Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 16, 2013

Hackers can cause traffic jams by manipulating real-time traffic data, researcher says
If, for example, an attacker drives a route and collects the data packets sent to Google, the hacker can replay them later with a modified cookie, platform key and time stamps, Jeske explained in his research paper. The attack can be intensified by sending several delayed transmissions with different cookies and platform keys, simulating multiple cars, Jeske added.

4 key takeaways from Samsung's Galaxy S4

Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy S4 last night, giving the world its first peek at the device in what can only be described as an odd theatrical circus. ... No matter how you look at it, though, the Galaxy S4 is a significant new phone -- and there's a lot to digest about it. But don't get overwhelmed: Beyond all the marketing glitz, these four takeaways will tell you everything you really need to know.

Locating the Health Care Value in RTLS
Location systems can automatically document intervals of time:-when a patient was put in a waiting room, how long until the triage nurse visited, when the patient was moved to radiology or an inpatient bed. "We do all that tracking behind the scenes," Deady says. If a milestone isn't completed or is taking longer than usual, it's tracked both retrospectively, to help fix chronic workflow problems, and in real time, so that staff can intervene for the patient.

How to Redefine Architecture for Real-Time Data
We’ve been using the term for years to talk about a wide range of things, from embedded C to extreme, low-latency analytics, but all of these miss what the business is really after — the ability to use more information more quickly to take rapid action in response to unanticipated changes in their environment. Companies like Barclays Wealth Management, Sears and USAA are redefining their architecture with new tricks ...

Introducing IT chargeback to meter private cloud use

The downside of the all-you-can-eat approach is that while a few entities will make out well -- namely the primary users of the private cloud services -- the cost moves to entities that may have very little use for the private cloud, but are billed for it nonetheless. Kind of like gym memberships after everyone has given up on their New Year's resolutions.

Catch 22: To avoid IT, end-users need IT's help
"To a large extent, leveraging the true power of an Enterprise API today in the form of an app for a mobile device requires the skills of a developer. Not many of the end-users that are able to create MS Access databases for their own purposes have the required skills to code HTML5, Xcode or Java and are not familiar with how to interpret a JSON payload."

Former Tribune staffer accused of conspiring in Anonymous hack
Matthew Keys, who according to his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles is deputy social media editor at Thomson Reuters, has been charged with one count each of conspiracy to transmit information, transmitting information and attempting to transmit information to damage a protected computer, according to a federal indictment filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

Big Data Analytics and Data Science at Netflix (Video)
Chris Pouliot, the Director of Analytics and Algorithms at Netflix: “…my team does not only personalizations for movies, but we also deal with content demand prediction. Helping our buyer down in Beverly Hills figure out how much do we pay for a piece of content. The personalization recommendations for helping users find good movies and TV shows. ...

Cisco: Cloud Is A Fundamental Shift In Way IT Is Delivered
“There is no doubt, the cloud has come of age,” notes Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “While investments in cloud outsourcing are small in comparison to internal IT/data center spending, they are growing each year, with the number of enterprise organizations turning to cloud technology to manage budgets and transform service delivery increasing significantly in the last two years.”

Data Visualization and BI Tools Selection
Data Visualization plays a very significant role in the world of Business Intelligence (BI). By efficiently identifying trends and patterns, Data Visualization helps the user quickly understand and relate to the data, without having to painstakingly sift through it. However, there are many factors to consider when evaluating a BI tool in this regard.

Quote for the day:

"The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." -- Lao Tzu

March 15, 2013

The BYOD focus is shifting from security to strategy
Partly, it’s that smart IT teams have realized they’re fighting a losing battle – with employees who are just trying to get their job done. “They’ve gone through the – entirely necessary – defensive thinking and they’ve realised ‘The more I say no, the less secure I become’.” ... “The conversation moves beyond BYOD to the ‘bring your own tools’ phenomenon,” says McQuire ... That means a strategic approach that’s not just about security and turning things off; it’s about taking advantage of these devices.

How You Can Benefit from All Your Stress
As Crum, Salovey, and Achor discovered, people have different beliefs about stress. Some people — arguably most people — believe that stress is a bad thing. They agreed with statements like "The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided," and the researchers called this the stress-is-debilitating mindset. Those who instead agreed that "Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth" had what they called a stress-is-enhancing mindset.

US NIST's Vulnerability Database Hacked
Last Friday, a NIST firewall "detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet," said spokeswoman Gail Porter. "NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline." The National Vulnerability Database is a comprehensive repository of information that allows computers to conduct automated searches for the latest known vulnerabilities in hardware or software computing products, Porter said.

Heads up Apple, here comes Samsung's 8-core chip
The Exynos 5 Octa uses technology from chip designer ARM called big.LITTLE. In other words, there are four "big" high-performance cores (up to 1.8GHz) and four "little" power-efficient cores (up to 1.2GHz), referred to as Cortex A15 and A7, respectively. ARM describes the Cortex A15 as suited for "heavy workloads," like gaming, and the Cortex A7 for doing more mundane workloads, such as managing operating system activities.

Google BigQuery is now even bigger

With the latest updates — announced in a blog post by BigQuery Product Manager Ju-kay Kwek on Thursday — users can now join large tables, import and query timestamped data, and aggregate large collections of distinct values. It’s hardly the equivalent of Google launching Compute Engine last summer, but as (arguably) the inspiration for the SQL-on-Hadoop trend that’s sweeping the big data world right now, every improvement to BigQuery is notable.

Time for an Architectural Reckoning
Architectural Reckoning is about which platform works best for which purpose. The synthetic architecture (the New Synthesis) that is its product won’t be organized or managed – won’t be understood – primarily on DM-like terms. Architectural Reckoning is a multi-disciplinary project, involving stakeholders from different factions across IT and the line of business. That this entire article has assessed this project from a DM-centric perspective is testament to just How Hard of a task it is. Who’s up for it?

Coming soon: Self-healing chips for smartphones, computers?
"It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself," said Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech, in a statement. "It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits. We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance."

How to Adjust to the Changing Face of Software Testing
Part of that transformation, Klain continues, means developing a "culture of professional testing" that drives how Barclays first recruits and then develop testers. This culture focuses our training, coaching, and mentoring programs that, in turn, hone in on testing skills such as heuristic test strategies, visual test models, exploratory testing and qualitative reporting.

Android vs. iOS: User Differences Every Developer Should Know
With Android and iPhone now combining for nearly 90 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, many app developers are concentrating their efforts on serving the majority of smartphone users through these two platforms. But there is an inherent tension when resources are limited and developers must choose one over the other, or decide which platform to develop for first. As a result, every app developer should be armed with some basic facts around the differences between Android and iPhone users when making these decisions.

UK scraps government CIO in tech project shake-up
While CIOs are expected to use the flows of information and data from that technology and across business systems to inform strategy, according to Bracken, this is tough in government because so much of that information and data residing in outsourced services and proprietary software. "Unfortunately, this means that many of our CIOs are performing as quasi-procurement and contract managers, rather than really driving business performance based on meeting user needs. The result? An uneven playing field, with the CIO role in government varying hugely by department and agency."

Quote for the day:

"The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players." -- Blaine Lee

March 14, 2013

How cloud computing, tablets will reshape the desktop
There are a number of advantages to deploying virtual desktops. First, users can access applications and data on their desktops from a variety of devices, including tablets. Second, in the case of VDI, user data resides in a company data center, and in the case of DaaS, data resides in a cloud provider's data center. This frees up on-premises storage space and ultimately saves enterprises money. And finally, users are not dependent on mobile-designed applications for tasks that are best done with full desktop applications.

Managing Software Risk
On March 14th at 11am EST, please join Dr. Bill Curtis, the Director of CISQ, and Chris Dressler, VP Technology Architecture, Cablevision for a webinar presentation about managing IT software development and maintenance by using metrics. Chris will cover some of the software risk drivers in the IT industry today, how business treats software risk and what types of measurement frameworks are used to manage risk today.

To Be Agile, Beware the Comforts of Ritual
Any task or process, big or small, can become a ritual. When we were doing eXtreme Programming, we eventually realized that pre-iteration planning and iteration planning had become rituals. We were doing them because the process said to do them. We learned about Kanban, which allowed us to jettison these rituals and the overhead associated with them.

Making innovation second nature
The only way to gain deep and capable skills for innovation is to practice and develop the expertise and muscle memory to make innovation seem more innate. Sometimes when we are asked why innovation seems so natural an activity to us as consultants, we can easily answer: because we do it so regularly it becomes almost second nature.

PayPal Acquires Mobile App Development Studio Duff Research
As PayPal CTO James Barrese wrote in a blog post today: ... As PayPal continues to be a leader in mobile payments, we are looking for talented engineers with proven mobile experience to help us imagine, develop and deliver products our customers love. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Duff Research – a group of award-winning mobile app developers – has been acquired by PayPal. This talented team of engineers will be joining the PayPal technology team to help us build creative and simple ways for our customers to use the PayPal digital wallet.

Demand for IT Security Experts Outstrips Supply
Demand for security professionals is growing at almost four times the pace of other roles in IT, and has consistently outstripped the supply of experts, according to new report. During the past five years, the number of job postings for IT security positions went up 73%, according to a study conducted by Burning Glass Technologies, which develops job-search and resume-parsing software. By contrast, the study showed that job postings for general IT positions went up just 20% in the same time period.

Top 10 consumerization definitions IT pros should know
This list counts down our top tech terms related to the consumerization of IT, and explains how they affect IT. The rankings are based on our most popular terms, and the 10 definitions that made the cut say a lot about where IT has come from, where it is now and where it's headed.

Java's security problems unlikely to be resolved soon, researchers say
"It's difficult to say what has been going on internally at Oracle for the past years, but based on an external impression I feel they could have reacted sooner," said Carsten Eiram, chief research officer at consulting firm Risk Based Security, via email. "I'm not sure Oracle really took the predictions of Java being the next major target seriously."

Beyond the BPM Culture Wars
Fragmentation and categorization is not always a bad thing, since it can help software buyers and decision makers better understand which solutions best match their business requirements and desired business outcomes. However, the fragmentation in BPM sometimes overlooks the primary purpose and value proposition of BPM – to help support creating a sustainable business change program.

Failed update to blame for outage of Microsoft cloud services
The failed firmware update occurred in one of Microsoft's datacenters, in a "core part" of its physical plant, subsequently leading to a "substantial temperature spike in the datacenter". The heat was "significant enough" causing the "safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter". In that area of the datacenter Microsoft houses "parts of the Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive infrastructure".

Quote for the day:

"Without a struggle, there can be no progress." -- Frederick Douglass

March 13, 2013

Microsoft reverses IE10's Flash blocking in Windows 8, RT
Rather than block all sites using Flash except those handpicked by Microsoft -- a "whitelist" strategy -- the company will revert to a "blacklist" that bars only some sites. All others with Flash will be rendered by the browser in Windows 8's Modern user interface (UI) -- still called "Metro" by many -- as well as Windows RT's Modern and desktop UIs.

Singapore Swings Ahead in 2013 Trends
Singapore has been uniquely placed to take advantage of the data surge. The new data stimulants of cloud services, mobile content, personal content, social media and the big data demands of MNC-driven sectors are set to take us to new data consumption highs in 2013. We spotlight the key themes facing the Singapore market.

Techniques for Mobile-friendly ASP.NET MVC 4.0 web sites
In this article, we will not attempt to create a new user interface for mobile devices in this article. In many cases if you have a complex web application it will make more sense to create an entirely different user interface with a different UI flow. However if you have a simple web application, a few minor changes will make a big difference in terms of usability for users on mobile devices without rewriting the UI completely.

iOS will surrender top tablet spot to Android in 2013, says IDC
The iPad Mini won't keep Apple in the driver's seat this year, Mainelli said. "The trend has been there, but this will be the first time Android overtakes iOS in the market," he said, citing his team's forecast for 2013-2017. For the year, Android-powered tablets will account for 48.8% of all devices shipped, edging iOS' 46%. During 2012, IDC pegged Android's share at 42.7%, iOS' at 53.8%.

SQL Encroaches on Big Data Turf
A few weeks ago GigaOM explored the subject with an article titled "SQL is what's next for Hadoop: Here's who's doing it," and just yesterday a PluralSight course on the topic was announced, described as "An investigation into the convergence of relational SQL database technologies from several vendors and Big Data technologies like Apache Hadoop." And there are plenty more similar things going on out there. So rest easy, SQL data developers, your future is still bright.

NIST, Stanford Team to Rescue Early Tetris From Digital Oblivion
In this 18-month project, NSRL will copy and dissect a software library of 15,000 titles from the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, held by the Stanford University Library. Considered to be one of the largest collections of obsolete software, this collection came into Stanford's possession in 1998 as part of its ongoing effort to preserve digital materials for research purposes.

Leadership and the Art of Struggle: 5 Things You Can Do
Struggle is a part of any human endeavor and leadership is no different. The problem is we view struggle as a negative. But struggle is how we grow. Without them we can’t reach our full potential as leaders. We like to think of our leaders as flawless. We like to be perceived as flawless—or at least we like people to think we have everything under control. But as Joe Badaracco has pointed out, “leadership is a struggle by flawed human beings to make some important human values real and effective in the world as it is.”

Get Microsoft "Data Explorer" Preview for Excel today
"Data Explorer" supports a wide range of data sources, including relational databases (SQL Server, Windows Azure SQL databases, Access, Oracle, IBM DB2, etc.), file formats (Text/Csv, Excel, XML, amongst others) and some other non-traditional data sources like Web (HTML tables, XML/JSON APIs, etc.), Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), OData feeds, Active Directory, Facebook, etc. In addition, "Data Explorer" also provides Online Search capabilities over millions of Wikipedia tables ...

Cloud services can save you money -- if you're careful
Sounds like many of the other IT projects you've shepherded, right? But it turns out it's incredibly complex to determine whether a move to the cloud will pay off for a given application. When done in haste, that analysis can lead companies to adopt the cloud for the wrong reasons, leaving them with higher costs or an inferior product when compared to an on-premises installation.

The Principles of Java Application Performance Tuning
In this fifth article I will explain about the principles of Java application performance tuning. Specifically, I will explain what is required in order to tune the performance of Java application, the steps you need to perform to identify whether your application needs tuning. I will also explain the problems you may encounter during performance tuning. The article will be finalized with the recommendations you need to follow to make better decisions when tuning Java applications.

Quote for the day:

"When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills" -- Chinese saying

March 12, 2013

RSA reports security shift toward monitoring and response capabilities
Customers' habits are maturing in the face of 100,000 new malware threats a day. The scale of this threat is impossible to manage unless businesses can improve their ability to understand what is happening in their networks, Tom Heiser told Computer Weekly. The need to get ahead and improve understanding of new and emerging threats is what is driving RSA product offerings, he said.

Indian startups go abroad to win at home
In an interview with ZDNet, Manju Gowda, co-founder of Nasscom's IP4Biz program, said the industry body had made some progress, but he believes it will be several years before the attitudes of Indian CIOs can be changed. "In India, to sell to your neighbor, you have to go through the United States," said Gowda, who previously sold his IT security startup to BlueCoat Networks.

New HIPAA Rule Has a Short Compliance Deadline and Lots to Do
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which administers and enforces the HIPAA/HITECH rules affecting privacy and security, not only made business associates liable for the security rule safeguards for PHI (which the HITECH Act required), but also extended the definition of "business associate" — and the liability — to subcontractors all the way down the business chain.

Creating Custom Tooltips with jQuery UI
While native tooltips are perfect for quick textual tips, their behavior and appearance can’t be customized, and this means that they don’t scale well to the complex requirements of modern Web applications. The 1.9 release of jQuery UI includes a new tooltip widget that’s intended to be an accessible, customizable and themeable replacement for the native tooltips provided by the browser.

Is Virtualization Stalled On Performance?
IT architectures that blindly optimize for maximum utilization, and subsequently make it hard to figure out who is really doing what, are unsuitable for hosting performance-sensitive applications -- which is to say, most mission-critical applications. But the situation is not hopeless. There are solutions in the marketplace today that aim to help IT with performance-focused management in dynamic IT infrastructures.

Public Cloud Backup: Is It Right for Your Enterprise?
So far, only 15 percent of its capacity is being used for backup and recovery, according to Steve Erdman, Acronis senior VP and general manager for global business development. "It's still a low percentage of capacity," Erdman says. "We work with our customers to get them over the natural hesitation, but it's not an exploding market yet." Steve Fairbanks, data management VP at CA Technologies -- which has added support for AWS and Microsoft Windows Azure to its popular ARCserve software -- agrees. "We're seeing an uptick, but it has been slower than we had expected," Fairbanks says.

Difference Engine: Hackers' paradise

In a sense, though, the victims of such attacks have only themselves to blame. Many organisations have a false sense of security, complacency even, as a result of having invested heavily in security tools in the past. Yet “non-agile” defences like passwords, firewalls and antivirus software, as well as intrusion-detection and prevention systems have become less than effective now attackers have started using encryption and other tricks to evade them, notes Deloitte & Touche, a management consultancy.

Artificial intelligence: Job killer or your next boss?
The power of man and machine working in unison was at the heart of a speech about intelligence augmentation by Ari Gesher, engineering ambassador with Palantir Technologies, at the recent Economist Technology Frontiers 2013 conference in London. "The idea is to have a very well defined division of labour between the computing machines and the humans," he said, spelling out the complementary skills of men and computers.

Don't let consumerization be the free lunch that eats you

There's a pretty good chance that replacing what you have with cloud-based alternatives would end up costing you more. ... Here's one valid reason to move to the cloud; astonishingly enough, various industry pundits got it right. Sorta -- they got it right in the sense that someone who bought a great horse but put the saddle on backward got it right. It's consumerization.

RegEx Lab.NET
Regex Lab .NET is a full-featured application for editing regular expressions. The application features a modern, highly functional UI allowing increased productivity when writing or debugging regular expression patterns. Features include: Supports all regex operations: matches, replacements and splits; Detailed match analysis with group breakdown; Syntax-highlighted editor with unlimited undo-redo buffer; Live highlighting of matches as text is typed and more.

Quote for the day:

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." -- Mark Twain

March 11, 2013

How Blueseed Will Change the Software Industry and Businesses around the World
Blueseed’s location is a ship 12 nautical miles from San Francisco in international waters, where thousands of startups and entrepreneurs will, by Q2 2014, live and work and have access to the Silicon Valley ecosystem without the need for a U.S. work visa. ... Both founders are involved in the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit venture for creating floating cities in international waters, thus facilitating creating a new way of life that is more equitable and entrepreneurial.

India doubles Google user data requests
According to the search giant's latest biannual Transparency Report, where it reveals the number of times governments and authorities asked for user data--usually to aid criminal investigations--in the six months to December 31, 2012, India was again ranked second for the total number of requests made by a single country. The United States topped the list again.

Middleware is Dying -- and for Good Reason
As acceptance of platform as a service (PaaS) cloud services continues to accelerate, companies are increasingly free to bypass underlying in-house IT infrastructure and OS requirements, focusing instead on the type of services required and service level agreements (SLA). And that spells the beginning of the end of having to deal with the cost and hassles of complex middleware.

U.S. SEC to propose rules to tackle trading glitches
The plan calls for these groups to notify the agency about problems with or changes to technology systems, to designate individuals or firms to participate in testing business continuity and disaster recovery plans at least once a year, and to give SEC staff access to systems so they can monitor compliance, according to an SEC fact sheet.

Singapore to double speed of free public Wi-Fi
"The free Wireless@SG network was popular with Singaporeans. More businesses have subscribed to Wireless@SG for their own operations, such as cashless payments and facility surveillance. But the system is now over six years old," noted Yaacob. Part of the enhancement plans includes a more simplified login process, instead of the current system requiring users to repeatedly enter their details on every use.

Hackers break in to RBA, but it's business as usual
According to Freedom of Information documents (PDF) released by the RBA in December last year, the attackers' point of entry was via an email. The email, which was sent in November 2011, contained a link to a malicious website that if clicked on would download malware to its victims' computers. It was sent, undetected by the RBA's security systems, to "several bank staff, including senior management up to head of department", and was ultimately successful — six people clicked the link and infected their machines.

Today in Tech: Privacy, Big Data, Meetings & More
Watching Steve Jobs speak, you wonder if either Jobs or his admiring audience gave any thought to privacy at all. Jobs’s pitch was mostly about business and strategy. The audience, even though they cheered when Jobs uttered the word freedom, seemed to be more excited about the new features that Mac would bring than about some of the darker implications of technology.

China calls for cooperation, not war, in cyberspace
"Cyberspace needs not war, but rules and cooperation," said foreign minister Yang Jiechi during a press conference. "We oppose cyberspace becoming a new battlefield, and to using the Internet as a new tool to interfere in another country's internal affairs." Yang is so far the highest Chinese official to comment on recent allegationsthat a large number of hacking attacks against foreign companies originated from China.

iYogi to enhance real-time monitoring with NICE
NICE Process Analytics, part of its Real-Time Activity Monitoring solution, will enable the automatic capture and analysis of all managed processes that take place within a single customer interaction, including tasks performed on both the phone and desktop by Tech Experts. This will increase iYogi’s visibility and productivity across multiple geographies, enhancing their Tech Experts’ delivery across all task types, skills and levels.

Amazon top-level domain plan opposed
Amazon has applied for a large number of gTLD strings, some directly linked to its current trademarks such as ".kindle," and ".fire" but others which are more generic in nature. Bookseller Barnes & Noble has also written a letter to ICANN to ask it to deny Amazon.com's application to purchase several TLDs, most notably ".book," ".read" and ".author," which it refers to collectively as the Book TLDs.

Quote for the day:

"Holding anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned." -- The Buddha

March 10, 2013

Skill Up to New Trends in IT

"Customers expect one person to play multiple roles in the project, and this requires multiple skills," comments Deepak Jain, senior vice president and global head, workforce planning and development, Wipro Technologies. "For eg, the project manager is also expected to technically guide the design team. A test engineer is also expected to think like a developer, and vice versa.

Yahoo Wants Bigger Slice of Tech Pie, Less Emphasis on Media Products
The company said Friday most of the products it is dumping will either shut down April 1 or not be supported after that date. Yahoo said in a blog post that affected products include Yahoo Avatars, Yahoo app for BlackBerry, Yahoo Clues (beta), Yahoo App Search, Yahoo Sports IQ, Yahoo Message Boards Website, and Yahoo Updates API.

A Myth That Thwarts Leadership

It is particularly strong when you have highly technical people who pride themselves on their knowledge and skill in their craft. Sometimes promotions are granted as a way to reward them financially even though these individuals often have no interest in managing or leading. Yet if you listen closely you will discover that lack of interest in managing or leading is only part of the story.

Platfora and the Foundation of Business Intelligence for Big Data
The challenge with traditional architectures, Platfora argues, is that they organize data in a predetermined manner, but today’s big data analytics environment dictates that organizations cannot determine in advance what they will need to explore in the future. If a user gets to a level of analysis that is not part of the current schema, someone in the organization must undertake a herculean effort to recreate the entire data model.

Huawei Leans on SAP to Give Enterprise Push a Boost
The direct benefit is that Huawei can now sell systems in an important growth area of the market, according to Gartner research director Adrian O'Connell. There are also indirect benefits in terms of raising the profile of Huawei as a server vendor, both for users and other technology partners, increasing the credibility of the technology capabilities of its offerings, he said via email.

China's next-generation internet is a world-beater
THE net is getting creaky and old: it is rapidly running out of space and remains fundamentally insecure. And it turns out China is streets ahead of the West in doing anything about it. A report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society last week details China's advances in creating a next-generation internet that is on a national level and on a larger scale than anything in the West.

Snapshot of Business Pulse

A recent Ernst and Young report, Business Pulse, provides fresh insight into the top 10 risks and opportunities in 2013 and beyond. It explores a range of thoughts and views and gives recommendations for those who want to start preparing and planning now for what lies ahead.

Big Data Plumbing Problems Hinder Cloud Computing
The plumbing problem arises because of the rate at which data is being created and stored. The digital universe will approximately double every two years, or 41% per year,2and it is rising significantly faster than the bandwidth of network connections. In 2012, there was just 11% growth in wired speeds, compared to an average connection rate of 2.8 Mbits/s.1 The growth of connections isn’t keeping up with the growth in data. That’s the plumbing problem.

Growing EAI with Apache Camel
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) provides us with all the knowledge, technology and best practices to build extensible, maintainable and capable integration solutions in a productive fashion. However, most integration solutions place us in a dilemma: while they are full of features and can be quite productive for large projects and a demanding environment, they also require big investments up front when it comes to learning the system, deploying it and maintaining it.

Exclusive Interview with Leadership Guru Author John Baldoni
In 2012, Leadership Gurus International ranked John Baldoni in its top 10 global leadership gurus. His increasingly relevant book, Lead with Purpose, featuring illuminating stories, interviews, and profiles of leaders from a variety of fields, shows readers how to take their organizations to the next level with renewed focus and improved direction. What does this bestselling business guru author have to say about Lead with Purpose, which builds on the foundation laid out in his groundbreaking title, Lead Your Boss?

Quote for the day:

"It's not enough to know that a threat is coming. You need to know whether it's coming right for you" -- Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen

March 09, 2013

Enterprise Risk Management: A Holistic Approach
A well defined risk management program cannot achieve high maturity scores without integrating risk management systems across divided organisational units. Organizations must thoroughly understand the true value at risk and ensure their compliance mandates are not geographically siloed. ... Check out this live webinar from GRC Forum.

What to do when the CEO says 'Get it Done!'
“What do you do if the CEO tells you to get it done and f*** the governance? Well you probably go away and just do it, no?” I should have been faster on my feet to say then and there that there are four good reasons why that was not necessarily the best response. These reasons are: Compliance, Efficiency, Risk, Effectiveness

Who ratted out Microsoft on browser ballot absence?
According to Almunia, neither the Commission nor Microsoft -- which had been left to police itself -- was aware that the browser choice screen was AWOL until a third party reported the oversight. The Commission has repeatedly declined to name the complainant. The choice screen, also called the "browser ballot," was not shown to approximately 15.3 million users running Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) for more than a year, from May 2011 until July 2012, when the complaint was filed.

Feds Asked to Back Cybersecurity with Legal Protections
“Cybersecurity is largely a voluntary effort, and the task of the government is encouraging companies to participate,” said Gus Coldebella, a former top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security and a partner in Washington at Goodwin Procter LLP. “If you don’t have liability protection, that task is infinitely harder.”

Don't Establish Data Management Standards
Standards can help control cost. Standards can help reduce complexity. But, in an age when a data management architecture needs to flex and meet the business need for agility, standards are a barrier. The emphasis on standards is what keeps IT in a mode of constant foundation building, playing the role of deli counter, and focused on cost management.

VMware preps vCloud-based public cloud service
The service, which is to be built on VMware's vCloud products, including vCloud Director, according to multiple industry sources, is still a ways away from general availability. In the meantime, VMware loyalists who use public cloud can find service providers with vCloud, so switching to a VMware public cloud wouldn't be necessary.

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft to fix four critical flaws, all versions of IE at risk again
Three of the four 'critical' flaws affect Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, Windows Server and SharePoint, which could all lead to remote code execution—such as allowing hackers access to install malware without user prompts or permission. The flaws rated 'important' could lead to an elevation of user privileges or the disclosure of user data or personal information.

IT Talent Shortage Or Purple Squirrel Hunt?
But a talent shortage may just be another way of describing an unwillingness to pay market rates for talent. As Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School, put it in The Wall Street Journal back in October, 2011, "Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can't get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That's an affordability problem, not a skill shortage."

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

Stop Reinventing Disruption
Disruption is a story of rational responses to a changing environment. It's the sensible retreat from your low margin business towards your more demanding, more profitable customers. At least, it's a sensible retreat until you recognize that you've given away your business and there is nowhere left to run.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day." -- Jesse Jackson

March 08, 2013

For credit card handlers, cloud computing guidelines just got clearer
If a client moves a regulated function to the cloud and later falls out of compliance due to a shortcoming on the cloud vendor's part, the client remains accountable. So it's essential to have as much clarity on these issues as possible. Recognizing this challenge with regards to the handling of credit card data, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council has recently issued guidance on how to apply PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) in the cloud.

Spectralink Tackles Nurse Workplace Safety with New Wireless Solution
“It is surprising to many people that the healthcare field can be a dangerous work environment,” said Spectralink vice president of marketing and product management, Mike Lanciloti. This is much of the reason why solutions like the Spectralink Staff Safety Solution were not developed until recently. ... The Spectralink Staff Safety Solution is designed to integrate easily with other complementary nurse applications

IT Risk Management: Managing the Problem
In this video, Dr. Ron Ross, NIST Fellow delivers a closing keynote on the subject. ... The RMF changes the traditional focus of cybersecurity as a static, procedural activity to a more dynamic approach that provides the capability to more effectively manage information system-related security risks in highly diverse environments of complex and sophisticated cyber threats, ever-increasing system vulnerabilities, and rapidly changing missions.

Fiddle with Javascript - JSFiddle
This cool workbench is a very useful tool for web developers to build HTML, CSS and Javascript based web content. It also has references to the popular Javascript frameworks and extensions.

WebKit and the Render Wars
Adopting WebKit would allow Microsoft to contribute code to the project, thus wielding greater influence in the HTML 5 conversation. It would also keep Microsoft ecosystem developers more in the Web mainstream. And even if Microsoft continued to maintain Trident, it could do so with a more informed sense of HTML 5 compliance.

Spring for Apache Hadoop Goes Live
The list of Spring Apache Hadoop capabilities also includes: declarative configuration support for HBase; dedicated Spring Batch support for developing workflow solutions that incorporate HDFS operations and "all types of Hadoop jobs;" support for the use with Spring Integration "that provides easy access to a wide range of existing systems using an extensible event-driven pipes and filters architecture;"

Aligning a cloud computing project with your enterprise mission
Companies adopting a cloud model make the mistake of opting for a vendor with the lowest price for their chosen type of cloud service. This is a big mistake; an enterprise needs to align its mission with the best cloud service provider, taking into account three aspects of the provider's offering: software, application availability and data requirements. The following are three questions related to these aspects that all enterprises should ask before choosing a cloud service or provider.

Intel touts multiscreen flexibility with 'display as a service'
The technology breaks the hard link between a video source and a screen the way virtualization software breaks the hard link between an operating system and a processor. With DAAS, people can view what's on their tablet on a big-screen TV, mirror the same imagery on multiple displays, or link up multiple displays to create a single, bigger display.

The CIO Toolkit for optimizing IT procurement
Our experience in the acquisition of IT products and services has demonstrated that, with a focused strategic plan and a close partnership with the procurement organization, CIOs can usually uncover significant savings opportunities and use smarter tactics to get the most from newly deployed IT dollars. Some of the ideas outlined below target potential low-hanging fruit;

Does ‘Big Data’ Mean the Demise of the Expert — And Intuition?
The subject-area expert, the substantive specialist, will lose some of his or her luster compared with the statistician and data analyst, who are unfettered by the old ways of doing things and let the data speak. This new cadre will rely on correlations without prejudgments and prejudice. To be sure, subject-area experts won’t die out, but their supremacy will ebb. From now on, they must share the podium with the big-data geeks, just as princely causation must share the limelight with humble correlation.

Quote for the day:

"The pessimist borrows trouble; the optimist lends encouragement." -- William Arthur Ward

March 07, 2013

Meet 60GHz Wi-Fi, the insanely fast future of wireless networking
Get ready for a ridiculous boost in wireless networking speed. Two camps are competing to deliver wireless components that are at least seven times faster than today's gigabit (IEEE 802.11ac) routers. By harnessing spectrum in the unlicensed 60GHz frequency band, these devices will be capable of offering more bandwidth than hardwired USB 3.0 connections.

Microsoft to update its core Windows 8 apps well before 'Blue'
Microsoft officials have acknowledged publicly that the Windows team is aware that the first-party apps on Windows 8 and Windows RT have room for improvement. Many users have been especially disappointed in the Mail and Music apps for the product, claiming they feel more like betas than full featured, polished products. Even though they're free, these apps, developed by the Windows team, just aren't very good, many of us Windows 8/Windows RT users feel.

Strategies of Deceit
Generally speaking, if your competition can accurately anticipate your next move, you will lose, and lose big. Consider the amount of energy going into keeping the timing and placement of the Normandy and Inchon landings a secret, not to mention Pearl Harbor. Preventing your competition/adversaries from correctly anticipating your next move is a very large part of strategic management, indeed.

Hyper-V Deep Dive, Part 3: Networking Enhancements
You do pay some penalties for the benefits of SR-IOV, particularly in the area of flexibility. If you're using the Hyper-V extensible switch and have configured port ACLs and perhaps one or more extensions, these are all bypassed with SR-IOV, as the switch never sees SR-IOV traffic. You also can't do teaming of SR-IOV capable NICs on the host; you can, however, have two (or more) physical SR-IOV NICs in the host, present these to VMs and in the VM create a NIC team out of the virtual NICs for performance and failover.

Car X.O. cares about health
“We’ve only begun to explore the potential of SYNC, he told the audience. “We’re not just catering to the entertainment needs of our customers, but contributing to their wellbeing.” Since the launch of SNYC, Ford, which has a blind spot monitor and a lane-keeping aid, has partnered with several technology companies to make other health products available, such as technology that can track driver behavior and distraction.

Dell Puts RNA Networks Assets to Use in New Product
The Fluid Cache 1.0 software technology sits between the Express Flash solid-state drives attached directly to the PowerEdge 12G servers. The software essentially is an application accelerator that creates a high-speed caching pool to facilitate quicker reading and writing of data from SSDs. The software layer replicates data in cache, which improves response time without compromising the data.

Stuxnet Two Years Older Than Previously Believed
The 18-page report reveals that development of the malware dates back to 2005, although it first appeared in the wild in 2007. It wasn’t identified until July 2010. What explains the two-year lead time? An extended refinement process was probably part of what made Stuxnet and its precursor, Flame, so sophisticated. The exploits these bits of malware pulled off without attracting attention were "nothing short of amazing," Mikko H. Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure, a security firm in Helsinki, Finland, told IEEE Spectrum

Conquering confidence killers
Joanna Barsh, senior director at McKinsey & Company and author of How Remarkable Women Lead, says her biggest career challenge was getting out of her own way: "I was -- and am -- plagued by limiting fears … and because my sponsors were not versed in how to interact with such a creature, they took my 'no thank you' at face value and offered their opportunity to the next person -- a man who invariably grabbed it. It turns out that the challenge of getting out of my own way was the biggest one I ever faced."

What inspires your work-at-home policies?
Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer have made up their minds on telecommuting, but your company may be debating whether to allow it. Or, perhaps, your company does allow work from home but would like to improve the process. What should you be assessing? What are the perils and benefits? What role does your company culture play in success or failure?

People are strange(rs)
The concept of recognizing and knowing your customer is, in essence, an ancient concept. Having a clear view of who your customer is and what he or she is actually buying (or intending to buy), has proven to be a serious business advantage over the years. You do not want your customer to feel like a stranger.

Quote for the day:

"Make no small plans for they have not the power to stir men's blood." -- Niccolo Machiavelli