May 20, 2015

Gartner Doubles Estimate Of Amazon Cloud Dominance
The revised Magic Quadrant kept Amazon in the desired top right of the leaders quadrant, with Microsoft also in the leader quadrant -- far below but moving a little closer to Amazon on the "completeness of vision" axis. On the second measure, the "ability to execute" axis, the companies remained basically the same as a year ago. Gartner put only those two vendors in the leaders quadrant, and that status is unlikely to change anytime soon. That's because the upper left quadrant next door, meant to illustrate the challengers to the leaders, was completely empty in this year's chart. No one is threatening Amazon as the dominant public cloud infrastructure provider, nor Microsoft as the runner up.


NoSQL for Mere Mortals: Designing for Document Databases
Redundant data is considered a bad, or at least undesirable, thing in the theory of relational database design. Redundant data is the root of anomalies, such as two current addresses when only one is allowed. In theory, a data modeler will want to eliminate redundancy to minimize the chance of introducing anomalies. ...  There are times where performance in relational databases is poor because of the normalized model. ... Document data modelers have a different approach to data modeling than most relational database modelers. Document database modelers and application developers are probably using a document database for its scalability, its flexibility, or both. For those using document databases, avoiding data anomalies is still important, but they are willing to assume more responsibility to prevent them in return for scalability and flexibility.


How do you solve a problem like big data?
Knowing where to begin with all of this information is one thing; having the time to actually get to work on it is completely different. So much of the data mentioned above is useful to marketers, but sifting through to identify and collect the necessary parts is an extremely long-winded task; far from ideal in an industry where spare hours are a rarity. Unfortunately, this tedious aggregation process is a necessity for most marketers, despite the availability of so many useful tools. According to a January 2015 Econsultancy report, just over half (51 per cent) of organisations are using more than 20 digital marketing technologies at present. With such a collection of data sources to tend to, though, it’s no surprise that so much valuable time is being wasted.


Executive interview: Google's big data journey
“Google fundamentally rethought the practice of building bigger machines to solve these problems. We only build using commodity machines and we assume systems will fail. “We have done several iterations of almost every piece of technology we showed in the white papers.” The use of massively scalable low-cost commodity infrastructure is almost diametrically opposite to how the big four IT suppliers go about tackling big data. Yes, they do NoSQL and offer Hadoop in the cloud. But SAP, for example, wants customers to spend millions on S/4 Hana, Oracle pushes Exadata and its engineered appliance family, IBM sells the merits of the z13 mainframe, and Microsoft has SQL Server.


What a new survey on payment solutions reveals about your security leadership
“Companies in the payments industry face a huge challenge in securing emerging technologies like virtual currencies, mobile payments and e-wallets. While the industry has always prioritized the implementation of new technologies for customer convenience, in today’s landscape, it is critical that they equally emphasize the security of new technologies to protect customer data.” -- Michael Bruemmer, vice president of Experian Data Breach Resolution ... The challenge is the balance between customer convenience (especially when it comes to their ability to give your company money) and the appropriate level of protection . This survey underscores that we’re under pressure to adopt new systems without a clear understanding of the risks or methods to reduce those risks.


Back-end complexity slows XenMobile deployments

The problem for some organizations is that they don't have the expertise in house to handle a XenMobile implementation. Deploying XenMobile is much different than Citrix virtual desktops, applications or cloud infrastructure, so the IT department's resident Citrix experts might not be able to easily transition, Gamble said. "Just because you're a good Citrix guy, doesn't equate to being a good XenMobile guy," he said. But it's not always the back-end complexity that makes XenMobile deployment difficult. Handling users is a challenge, too. "Once we did a pilot, the deployment wasn't that bad," said Noel Prevost, a services delivery manager at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Miss.


SaaS and the Cloud are Still Going Strong
Aside from the prominent cost benefits of cloud computing, innovation and mobility are highlighted as key reasons for uptake. Cloud technology enables faster, cheaper software development, with key cloud usage scenarios including collaboration, file sharing, business productivity, CRM and marketing. Mobile applications including Vend applications, PayPal platforms and secure VPN access are some of the top requirements of businesses in 2015. ... QuoteColo’s infographic sums up many of the key stats and predictions for the future of cloud computing throughout the world, and highlights the importance of strong cloud infrastructure and application development through 2015 and into the future.


Celebrate mistakes: Creating a culture of forgiveness
When you encourage healthy risk-taking, you encourage innovative behavior in your team. Employees who know that they’ll have your help and support when problems arise feel empowered to integrate changes into new projects and daily operations. Those changes could save time, save money or bring in a big win for the organization — just the sort of behavior you want to encourage. But does your team know you’ll make it a learning opportunity and not a mark of shame if something doesn’t work? Of course we’re talking about reasoned risk, with plenty of planning. There are always ways to learn from a thought-out endeavor that failed.


Toward Omniscient Cybersecurity Systems
CISOs recognize this disjointed situation and many are undertaking cybersecurity integration projects to address this problem. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but I find that a lot of these projects are one-off point-to-point integration efforts. Good idea, but CISOs should be pushing toward an ambitious endgame – omniscient cybersecurity systems. ... In summary, CISOs need a single system or an integrated architecture that can tell them everything about everything – in real-time. This system must be smart enough to recognize patterns and offer user-friendly visual analytics interfaces enabling analysts to easily pivot from one data point to all others. Armed with this type of system, cybersecurity professionals could move on to the next task – automated remediation and security operations.


Finance and retail sectors struggle to detect cyber intrusions, study finds
Key findings in the financial services sector included that 71% of organisations polled view technologies that provide intelligence about networks and traffic as most promising at stopping or minimising advanced threats during all phases of an attack. But the study showed that only 45% have implemented incident response procedures, and only 43% have established threat-sharing agreements with other companies or government groups. More than half of financial services firms consider distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks as an advanced threat, but only 48% say they are effective in containing DDoS attacks, and only 45% have established threat-sharing agreements to minimise or contain the impact of DDoS attacks.

---

Quote for the day:

"The measure of success isn't if you have a tough problem, but whether it's the same one you had last year." -- J.F. Dulles

---

May 19, 2015

IS Audit Basics: The Soft Skills Challenge
A really good listener must also learn how to take into account nonverbal communications, also known as body language. This includes body movements, gestures, eye contact, facial expression, physiological changes and more. Warning: Body language is, like national languages, not universal and is strongly embedded in the culture. For example, some cultures allow body language to be explicit and show emotions openly through gestures, physical proximity and strong—even challenging—eye contact; whereas, other cultures are more focused on controlling emotions and body language and reveal little, unless you are truly familiar with the particular culture. Control and understanding of body language can be learned and mastered, as evidenced by the best poker players and diplomats.


Industry's First Schema-free SQL Engine - Apache Drill 1.0 is Now Generally Available
Drill expands the spectrum of BI use cases by providing the ability to get value from all of the raw datasets available in organizations, wherever it is. The ability to explore and ask ad hoc questions on full fidelity data—in its native format as it comes in—is what sets Drill apart from traditional SQL technologies, which only solve part of the puzzle by working with only centrally-structured data. The BI/Analytics use cases that Drill enables include self-service raw data exploration and complex IoT/JSON data analytics, as well as ad hoc queries on Hadoop-powered enterprise data hubs. ... With the solid foundation paved with the GA release, the Drill community is planning to add new, exciting features in a variety of areas such as JSON, complex data functions, new file formats and SQL.


Ownership: to risk or not to risk
Risk-taking is one of those things that sounds easier than it is to practice. The plethora of success stories that have embedded itself into the mythos of big-name companies have certainly contributed to this concept: the genius who pursues an idea that has never been undertaken before and is able to reap the considerable benefits after, the startup company that began in a friend’s basement and within three years, has taken over most of the market share in its industry, or the project that took 100 failures to find success, making the entire process worth it. And while businesses will always strive for success, dreaming of becoming the next Apple, the prospect of failing at a new venture can often give pause, if not discourage risk-taking entirely. That’s why it’s up to the champion to take ownership by calculating the associated risks with the projected benefits, and decisively directing his or her team to move forward with a course of action.


DDoS reflection attacks are back – and this time, it's personal
“There's a fertile ground of home systems,” he said. “A property configured home firewall can block this, but there are many improperly configured home systems connected to the Internet – and there are also industrial systems that can be used to reflect attacks as well.” This attack source is also harder to shut down, he said. “It's easier to go into the data center and have the service providers do the clean-up,” he said. Last quarter, SYN flood attacks – where “synchronize” messages are sent to servers – was the leading attack vector, accounting for 17 percent of all attacks, down slightly from 18 percent of all attacks at the start of 2014. There has also been a change in the size of the median attack, and the typical size range of attacks, Kobrin said, as defensive measures have improved.


10 tips to get the most out of your project management system
“Many companies stumble with adopting project management solutions because the software is intrinsically hard to use,” says Scott Bales, director of Solutions Engineering at Replicon, a provider of timesheet management software. “Businesses should find a solution where workflow and configurability feel intuitive, and it has built-in intelligence that anticipates what you need to get your work done,” he says. “The best software gives you a comprehensive set of functions that can be easily added to over time.” If you have a small or no budget, “define your goals and objectives and see if there are any free PM solutions which satisfy them,” says Victoria Kartunova, marketing manager, Bitrix24, a social collaboration and communications platform.


Making the first 100 days count: How a new CIO sets the right priorities
The second area of immediate attention for Bramwell and his team is to think about how the IT team can be agile and support new initiatives at Said. For example, that support might cover how the organisation interacts with its students or how it delivers content, including across distance learning platforms and collaborative systems. Finally, Bramwell's third initial focus is to consider the type of IT organisation that will help deliver business change for the School. He says the technical skills of the team he is inheriting at Said are not as mature as the one he left behind at Wellcome Trust, so talent and succession management will be crucial. "It's an educational journey for everyone, not just for those working in the IT team," he says. "We must make sure our technical capabilities are aligned with the aspirations of the business. We need a clear, well-communicated change


How to Pivot Your Data
Capturing and storing this increasing volume of data is extraordinarily taxing on IT departments. Whether businesses know it or not, the cost of storing and keeping data is one of the heaviest burdens on a company’s infrastructure resources. These costs extend beyond the monetary price of a data storage system. Physically, the data explosion sucks power in data centers more than ever before. Data growth also slows system processes and forms outage windows, creating situations ranging from inconvenienced users to total system shutdowns. As expensive as it is, however, companies cannot afford not to capture these huge volumes of data, for while Big Data promises huge business advantage to those who harness it, the dark side is that those who do not will face an increasing competitive disadvantage.


Bitcoin Startup 21 Unveils Product Plan: Embeddable Chips for Smartphones
21’s concept of “embedded mining” marks a very different approach. It foresees mainstream consumer devices quietly mining in the background to receive very small, ongoing distributions from a managed pool of bitcoin earnings. Embedded mining was long assumed to be part of the company’s mission. However, the business philosophy outlined in Mr. Srinivasan’s blog post paints a different vision than many bitcoin enthusiasts had assumed to be the case ever since a regulatory filing revealed an initial $5 million fundraise in November 2013. Rather than seeking to dominate the highly competitive business of bitcoin mining for profit, 21 is focused on a future “Internet of Things” era in which interconnected appliances will, in Mr. Srinivasan’s words, draw from an “infinite stream of digital currency” to engage in micro-transactions.


Global risk management survey, ninth edition
Risk management must respond to “the new normal”—an environment of continual regulatory change and ever more demanding expectations. In the United States, the Federal Reserve has introduced the Enhanced Prudential Standards and the Comprehensive Capital Adequacy Review. ... Two emerging risks in particular are receiving increased attention from financial institutions and their regulators. Cyber attacks on corporations, including financial institutions, have increased dramatically in the last few years, requiring institutions to strengthen the safeguards for information systems and customer data. Regulators are more closely scrutinizing how institutions manage conduct risk and the steps they are taking to create a risk culture and incentive compensation programs that encourage ethical behavior.


Microsoft offers IT guidance to prepare for Windows as a Service
Currently, Microsoft's wording in its guidance around some hotfixes is to only apply them if trying to fix a very specific set of problems. But when there's data corruption, a bug check or a system hang, it's actually more detrimental than not to wait, Paquay argued. He said if more users would apply optional hotfixes and update rollups proactively, Microsoft would be able to gather more telemetry data and fix path and hotfix problems more rapidly, allowing the company to promote tested fixes as "recommended" or "important" updates/rollups for a broader group of customers. Once an update appears in Windows Update as "recommended," it has already been installed on and deployed to millions of Windows devices already, meaning it has been vetted to a fairly substantial degree (and not just inside Microsoft or by Windows testers only), he said.

---

Quote for the day:

"If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless." -- Daryyl F. Zanuck

---

May 18, 2015

Software Licensing got you down? Get your SaaS in gear and go cloud
Why is software so complex to license correctly and why are there are so many SKUs and editions? Let's count the reasons -- localization issues and judicial decrees, different sets of customers having different sets of needs and being in different sectors (public vs. private) -- but the real problem stems down to compliance. I can't go into exact detail how much revenue is lost by large software vendors by incorrectly reported software usage -- whether intentional or unintentional -- but what I can say is that the reason why the legal teams for these enterprise software companies are so large is that quarterly/yearly compliance audits and settlements with large companies can often shift revenue reporting in a business segment from "meh" to "good" or "good" to "excellent" .


Barclays adds extra security through domain name switch
Barclays Group CISO Troels Oerting said the changed domain names simplify the user experience and make it clear to customers they are engaging with a genuine Barclays site. “This clarity, along with the advantages of controlling our own online environment, enables us to provide an even more secure service, which we know is of utmost importance to our customers, and ultimately serves to increase trust and confidence in Barclays’ online entities,” he said. With online banking becoming the channel of choice for more consumers, cyber fraud is on the rise and banks are under pressure to increase security. One IT security professional in the banking sector said initiatives like this will help, but he warned that educating customers to check the actual domain name they are visiting is essential.


How machine learning works
Computers are hyper-literal, ornery beasts: anyone who has tried programming one will tell you that the difficulty comes from dealing with the fact that a computer will do exactly and precisely what you tell it to, stupid mistakes and all. ... But the ever-increasing power of computers has allowed deep learning machines to simulate billions of neurons. At the same time, the huge quantity of information available on the internet has provided the algorithms with an unprecedented quantity of data to chew on. The results can be impressive. Facebook's Deep Face algorithm, for instance, is about as good as a human being when it comes to recognising specific faces, even if they are poorly lit, or seen from a strange angle. E-mail spam is much less of a problem than it used to be, because the vast quantities of it circulating online have allowed computers to realise what a spam e-mail looks like, and divert it before it ever reaches your inbox.


Design Thinking: a tested method for creating breakthrough innovation
Real innovations that make major traction in the market solve problems people didn’t know they had. Real innovations get out of the office and embody the matter. They walk in the shoes of the intended audience, even visit them at home or their office. They begin with empathy, then follow an iterative process, and then reap substantial rewards. This formal innovation process was named just a few years ago. While it remains contested, Design Thinking is a set of principles—from mindset and roles to process—that work for consumer products, software, services, even in the social sector. Design Thinking is a method for solving complex problems. Think of Design Thinking as installing a new operating system for life: it’s that revolutionary. Looking at the world with an inspired eye for redesigning every aspect that could be improved is the mindset. There are few experiences that could not be improved.


Advice for mobile users who choose simplicity over security
Each of the password managers above is simple to install from the Google Play Store. Once you've installed and set them up, you'll only need one password to rule them all. Some of these tools even offer random password generators. You want seriously strong passwords, so use that feature like your data depends on it. Yes, random passwords are nearly impossible to remember, but when you have a password manager at your disposal, it won't matter. And before I forget, the master password that allows you access to your password manager? If you set it as 123 or password or jackiscool... your data may as well just walk out on its own volition. What if you're not willing to use challenging passwords or a password manager? What then? For those, I have a few suggestions:


Cloud Security – Tips for a Better Cloud Architecture
There are powerful new tools around IPS/IDS and data loss prevention (DLP). Are you deploying them? Do you have policies in place for monitoring anomalous traffic hitting an application? Do you know if a user is accidentally (or maliciously) copying data from a share or network drive? How good are your internal data analytics? These are critical questions to ask to ensure that your environment is locked down and that data isn’t leaking. Big cloud providers go out of their way to ensure that multi-tenant architectures stay exactly that – multi-tenant. Your data must be isolated when needed and have very restricted access. Furthermore, that information must regularly be tested and truly segmented using next-generation networking and security policies. If not, the results can be similar to what Sony, Target, or even Anthem experienced.


Healthcare Leaders Express Tech Legislation Concerns
One of those areas is telehealth. Section 3021 of the bill, “Telehealth services under the Medicare program,” calls on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide Congress with a report on the populations of Medicare beneficiaries whose care may be improved most by the expansion of telehealth services, the types of high volume procedures codes or diagnoses which might be suitable for telehealth, as well as the barriers that might prevent expansion of such services. However, the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) expressed its disappointment at the lack of substantive telehealth provisions in the current version of the 21st Century Cures bill. “It appears that the staff and members of the committee have once again been led by CMS and the Congressional Budget Office into asking for a study instead of taking real action,” said Jonathan Linkous


9 programming languages and the women who created them
Software development has a well-known reputation for being a male-dominated world. But, despite this, women have made many important and lasting contributions to programming throughout the decades. One area, in particular, where many women have left a mark is in the development of programming languages. Numerous pioneering women have designed and developed the languages programmers use to give computers instructions, starting in the days of mainframes and machine code, through assemblers and into higher level modern day languages. Use the arrows above to read the stories behind 9 programming languages that have had a significant impact over the years and the women who created them.


Cloud and mobility call for new network defense tactics
Enter network security. While networking gear itself is typically not the ultimate target of an attack, malicious code and other threats often travel through infrastructure devices to reach their mark. To that end, the network plays a crucial role as a multi-layer defense against threats: both as a source of data on malware and other threats, and as a mechanism to block attacks and prevent leaks. Within this landscape, what are some of the greatest threats to network security today and what can enterprises do to stave off attacks? ... Cybercriminals have also eagerly exploited other access points into the network -- paying particular attention to remote and mobile devices. As businesses continue to make it easier for employees to use their own mobile devices, IT must be able to protect the network against techniques hackers may use to infiltrate the network perimeter via an unmanaged device.


Q&A with Alex Blewitt on Swift Essentials
The advantage of Swift is that the binary is statically linked with its Swift dependencies, so once you've compiled and built the app, it will continue to run even if Swift itself evolves. It may mean that the source has to be updated if compiling with a newer version of the compiler, but the version that's installed on end users' phones shouldn't require any changes if Apple updates the OS. This can be used to migrate parts of an application to Swift whilst leaving the rest in Objective-C, but it's not going to be long before Objective-C and Swift trade places on the TIOBE charts. I think Swift will continue to be released with minor changes for a couple of years - I doubt we'll see Swift 2.0 at WWDC this year, for example. But when Apple announces the binary backwards compatibility which will allow Swift frameworks to be created, that's when it can be considered mature.

---

Quote for the day:

"Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do." -- Mary Kay Ash

---

May 17, 2015

Never Waste A Good Crisis
When something goes wrong, someone takes the fall. But for an influencer like an Enterprise Architect, a crisis can be a good thing. Why? Because we are change agents. And people won’t change unless they are forced to change. John Kotter, in his book “Leading Change” suggests that one of the greatest obstacles to change is complacency. Change just isn’t urgent enough. He’s completely right, and a crisis is often what is needed to break through complacency. To take advantage of a crisis, you have to be ready. Have your arrows sharpened and sitting in your quiver, ready to go. During a crisis, you may get exactly one shot to propose an idea, and it may not be the moment you expect. There won’t be a “right” time. Just the opportune time. So be prepared.


Using JavaScript to Create Geospatial and Advanced Maps
Until recently, developing geospatial apps beyond a 2D map required a comprehensive GIS service such as ArcGIS, Nokia Here, or Google Maps. While these APIs are powerful, they are also expensive, onerous to learn, and lock the map developer to a single solution. Fortunately, there are now a wealth of useful, open source JavaScript tools for handling advanced cartography and geospatial analysis. In this article, I’ll examine how to implement GIS techniques with JavaScript and HTML, focusing on lightweight tools for specific tasks. Many of the tools I’ll cover are based on services such as Mapbox, CloudMade, and MapZen, but these are all modular libraries that can be added as packages to Node.js or used for analysis in a web browser.


BioBeats founder warns of the dark side of wearables and biometrics
Plans worries some organisations are more interested in using wearables and the data they collect for "sinister purposes". In a twist he describes as "Orwellian", he claims that "some of the insurance providers we work with want to calculate insurance premiums in real-time," which he sees as problematic. Howver, Plans notes that "while some of the aspects of biometric data gathering from wearables may at first seem surveillance-like and therefore Orwellian in nature, they offer very clear and potentially life-saving advantages to human life and the provision of care. This means that whilst we have a lot of work to do to ensure privacy, security and choice for people and their data, we also have a tremendous amount of potential health benefit to deliver."


Hadoop demand falls as other big data tech rises
Hadoop vendors will almost surely languish -- unless they're willing to embrace adjacent big data technologies that complement Hadoop. As it happens, both leaders already have. For example, even as Apache Spark has eaten into MapReduce interest, both companies have climbed aboard the Spark train. But more is needed. Because big data is much more than Hadoop and its ecosystem. ... As Aerospike executive and former Wall Street analyst Peter Goldmacher told me, a major problem for Hortonworks and Cloudera is that both are spending too much money to court customers. While these companies currently have a lead in terms of distribution Goldmacher warns that Oracle or another incumbent could acquire one of them and thereby largely lobotomize the other because of its superior claim on CIO wallets and broad-based suite offerings.


IT Pro Panel: How the IoT will change your business
The IoT describes a phenomenon in which everyday devices can send and receive data over the internet, and potentially between one another, too. Everything from your kettle to aircraft parts could – and probably will – become connected, with the burgeoning industry set to grow as broadband quality and coverage improves. In fact, analyst firm Gartner predicts there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2020 – more than three for every person on the planet. In 2015 alone, it puts the number of connected machines at 4.9 billion come the end of the year. So what does this mean for your business?


Sourcing Security Superheroes: Part 1: Battling Retention and Recruitment
The mindset of cybersecurity practitioners is very different from most others in the corporate world. Think about what makes security professionals successful. They are smart, creative and don’t like to follow rules for the sake of compliance. It’s their ability to ignore constraints and to be disruptive that allows them to solve problems in new ways. Structured thinkers are important in all organizations. But the bottom line is that enterprises need creative hunters, not just responders, on the frontlines. If we apply that way of thinking and interacting to the traditional workforce, we can see where conflicts start to arise. Organizations like to hire from the highest pedigree of universities and pick the best and brightest graduates.


How to Be an Indispensable Force in the Workplace
In order to be the best, take advantage of any professional development opportunities available to you, and continuously build your knowledge using resources like trade journals and industry events. Actively seizing every possible opportunity to improve yourself as a professional makes you a better employee and gives you more opportunities to connect with hiring managers looking for top talent. ... Use your skills and the knowledge you've procured becoming the best at what you do, and diversifying your skills, to anticipate any issues that may arise. Whether it's a work or local trade organization meeting or just an issue brought up at a networking event, be prepared to provide intelligent, insightful solutions.


From Information to Action: The Importance of the Data Story
An important part of this process is humanizing the data. Like any story, your data story should describe how events affect people. For example, it’s one thing to say that recalibrating a QA process will lead to reduced failure rates. It’s another to say that doing this will mean fewer angry customers returning products and demanding refunds. Of course, with all this talk of dragons and damsels (sorry, but the old stories were rather sexist!), it’s useful to remember another use of the word story – that is, the news story. The way that stories are presented in the news differs from some other forms of storytelling. Rather than structure the story as an entertaining journey and keeping the audience guessing what the outcome will be, a news report aims to grab your attention right away and give you the facts as concisely as possible.


Enterprise Architecture's Missing Models
An essential part of the enterprise architecture description is the set of organisational models – organisations, divisions, departments etc. and their relationships – for the organisations participating in the enterprise. By any rational methodology, this set must include the significant temporary organisations – the programmes and projects – not just the “BAU“- Business-As-Usual – operational organisations. Yet, how many Enterprise Architecture descriptions actually model the temporary organisations – the programme and projects – that will deliver the changes? This omission is even more glaring when you consider that Programme Management will, if it uses a proper systematic methodology, produce most of the models anyway! Every programme will have an explicit model of the target or transitional state of the enterprise at the end of the programme.


RaptorDB - the Document Store
The main driving force behind the development of RaptorDB is making the developer's and support jobs easier, developing software products is hard enough without complete requirements which becomes even harder when requirements and minds change as they only do in the real world. ... To aid the searching in such databases most Document store databases have a map function which extracts the data needed and saves that as a "view" for later browsing and searching. These databases do away with the notion of transactions and locking mechanism in the traditional sense and offer high data through-put and "eventually consistent" data views. This means that the save pipeline is not blocked for insert operations and reading data will eventually reflect the inserts done

---

Quote for the day:

"Nothing is so potent as the silent influence of a good example" -- James Kent

---

May 16, 2015

Baidu’s Artificial-Intelligence Supercomputer Beats Google at Image Recognition
The new computer, called Minwa and located in Beijing, has 72 powerful processors and 144 graphics processors, known as GPUs. Late Monday, Baidu released a paper claiming that the computer had been used to train machine-learning software that set a new record for recognizing images, beating a previous mark set by Google. “Our company is now leading the race in computer intelligence,” said Ren Wu, a Baidu scientist working on the project, speaking at the Embedded Vision Summit on Tuesday. Minwa’s computational power would probably put it among the 300 most powerful computers in the world if it weren’t specialized for deep learning, said Wu. “I think this is the fastest supercomputer dedicated to deep learning,” he said. “We have great power in our hands—much greater


Taking our breach response plan for a test-drive
One thing that we security managers can be sure of is this: There is no guarantee that our company will not suffer a security breach. In fact, the odds are increasing all the time, helped along by the proliferation of mobile devices, companies’ heavy use of software as a service and the consumerization of IT. And let’s face it: Creating a culture that fosters innovation and attracts talent exacts a cost in defensibility. Recognizing that a breach could very well lie in our future isn’t the same thing as surrendering. When something is nearly inevitable, you should prepare for it. That’s the philosophy behind disaster recovery, and I think it should apply to data security as well. So, just as we do testing for disaster recovery, why not do a trial run of our breach response?


A Hadoop data lab project on Raspberry Pi - Part 1/4
This four part blog will provide a step-by-step guide for the installation of open source Apache Hadoop from scratch on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B over the course of the next three to four weeks. Hadoop is designed for operation on commodity hardware so it will do just fine for tutorial purposes on a Raspberry Pi. We will start with a single node Hadoop setup, will move on to the installation of Hive on top of Hadoop, followed by using the Apache Hive connector of the free SAP Lumira desktop trial edition to visually explore a Hive database. We will finish the series with the extension of the single node setup to a Hadoop cluster on multiple, networked Raspberry Pis. If things go smoothly and varying with your level of Linux expertise, you can expect your Hadoop Raspberry Pi data lab project to be up and running within approximately 4 to 5 hours.


Auditing Is IGA’s New Kid on the Block
There is a lot that IGA can learn from SOD controls monitoring. A great, practical example is how auditing has started to appear in IGA products over the last two or three years. Of all the capabilities identified for our critical capabilities research, auditing was one of the most forward-looking for IGA even though such capabilities have been commonplace in SOD controls monitoring products for a number of years. The essence of auditing in IGA is the ability to identify issues with access or data, assign owners to the issues, and then provide a framework for resolving the issues. The framework for resolving issues is usually provided through some type of case management interface, although some products make use of their general workflow capabilities to simulate case management activities.


For Venom security flaw, the fix is in: Patch your VM today
The first thing many of you think when learning this is: "Who cares, I've never used a floppy drive on my virtual machine (VM)!" Ah, but, you don't have to activate the virtual floppy drive for a potential hacker snake to bite you. By default, the legacy floppy drive code is still in there, even though it's never been used. The corruption is still hiding in the code. So, even though you'd never dream of using a VM floppy drive, you're still open to attack. Indeed Crowdstrike maintains that "even if the administrator explicitly disables the virtual floppy drive, an unrelated bug causes the vulnerable FDC code to remain active and exploitable by attackers." Therefore, if you are running QEMU, or virtualization stacks that use it, such a Xen, KVM, and Oracle's VirtualBox, you could be hacked.


10 common SQL Server problems and solutions
This handy two-page list outlines 10 familiar SQL Server problems and an assortment of solutions. From "Out of Space" errors to a database going suspect, this list is great quick reference for every SQL administrator. ... You may need to follow a large chain of blocks to find the head. Once there, you can use the dbcc inputbuffer command to see the SQL statement that the SPID is running. This will point you toward the problem's cause.Join this ongoing discussion and let us know if this download provides helpful information and if there's anything we can do to improve the document's format or content.


Even Robots Now Have Their Own Virtual World
“We are trying to mimic reality as closely as we can,” says Nate Koenig, CTO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which is developing Gazebo, and who has spent the last decade leading its development. “The goal is to easily switch over to a real robot.” Gazebo is part of the Robot Operating System, free and open-source software for controlling various parts of a robot. Because roboticists contribute code back to the ROS project, the operating system has gained considerable momentum as a platform for robot development, especially within academia. Gazebo and ROS are being used to develop many other types of hardware. A researcher in Switzerland, for instance, is using the software to develop an autopilot system for quadcopter aircraft.


ANXPRO Exchange To Include Aten “Black Gold” Coin In 2015
“We are looking forward to offering the Aten “Black Gold” Coin for trade on ANXPRO. The Aten “Black Gold” Coin has a built-in, anti-money laundering control system and is unlike anything in the market today, ” said Lo. “We feel that the NAC’s dedication to AML regulatory practices is similar to our values at ANX. This new crypto-currency simplifies the management of customer identities and our record-keeping requirements.” Marcus Andrade hopes that his company will help to do away with any negative perceptions currently attached to digital-currency like Bitcoin. He said that the NAC is in the process of creating a database only for government officials and banks so they can see the transactions of its clients. Additionally, all governmental entities using the system will be verified.


Microsoft: It's time to shoot the lawyers
Microsoft isn't comfortable releasing products until they are a pain in the axe. Ed describes it thusly: "I blame the lawyers. Every time the discussion turns to anything close to licensing, they bury it in ... fertilizer." ... Microsoft, too, has a core, unwritten mission statement, which I would describe as: "Microsoft builds incredibly deep, powerful, and flexible software products that -- before they see the light of day -- must be infused with a level of unnecessary inconvenience, incomprehensible restrictions, and regressive policies such that all possible joy has been removed prior to customer contact." If Nadella wants to compete in a world with Amazon, Apple, and Google, it's probably time to shoot all the lawyers. Otherwise, there will be no joy in Redmond.


Using Technology To Humanize Finance
“Banking is necessary – banks are not.” Bill Gates said this in 1994. It was a bold statement to make at the time, and one that some have associated with the start of a transformation in financial technology. Now, two decades later, we are seeing this revolution unfold before our eyes.... It is one where large, traditional banks are increasingly facing heavy competition from new entrants – namely, online marketplace lenders – that are delivering a more human lending experience through the technology, transparency and trust that consumers want from their financial services providers. In a March report titled “Future of Finance,” Goldman Sachs analysts Ryan Nash and Eric Beardsley noted that regulatory changes and new technologies are among the top factors reshaping the traditional banking sector and enabling the rapid growth of marketplace lending.


Why analysts should take a predictive approach to problem solving
Skills are needed all around for advanced analytics. This skill set sometimes requires knowledge of recent data-related technologies such as Apache Hadoop. It can require knowledge of analytics techniques and how to use them. On the analytics front, vendor tools are becoming easier to use. Interfaces are easier to navigate than previous versions. Some tools can take data and decide which models make sense once outcome variables are specified. Some tools can even determine appropriate models and then automatically put together the story as output. However, many organizations realize that this behavior doesn’t negate the need for people who can frame a problem, interpret the output of an analysis and communicate the results.

---

Quote for the day:

"Measurement is fabulous. Unless you're busy measuring what's easy to measure as opposed to what's important" -- Godin

---

May 15, 2015

Principal Component Analysis And Singular Value Decomposition
One of the most common dimensionality reduction technique is filtering, in which you leave most of the dimensions and concentrate only on certain dimensions. But that doesn’t always work, when you are dealing with image data, the number of pixels represents the number of dimensions in the image. Now you have lot of dimensions and you don’t want to throw out dimensions inorder to make sense of your overall data set. As the dimensionality of your data increases, the volume of the space increases, in a sense the data you have becomes more and more sparse(scattered). One way to think about it is a very high data set might live in some kind of high dimensional manifold and as you are increasing the number of dimensions, that manifold becomes bigger and bigger.


Why Big Data is bad for science
“Scientific advances are becoming more and more data-driven,” write statistician Jianqing Fan of Princeton University and colleagues. “The massive amounts of … data bring both opportunities and new challenges to data analysis.” For one thing, huge datasets are seductive. They invite aggressive analyses with the hope of extracting prizewinning scientific findings. But sometimes Big Data In means Bad Data Out. Wringing intelligent insights from Big Data poses formidable challenges for computer science, statistical inference methods and even the scientific method itself. Computer scientists, of course, have made the accumulation of all this big data possible by developing exceptional computing power and information storage technologies. But collecting data and storing information is not the same as understanding it.


Lily Is A Self-Flying Drone That Follows You Around And Films You
Whatever you want to call it, the Lily drone uses a combination of GPS and visual processing to track the user. The drone contains an accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, GPS and three cameras — one camera to do the recording, one that’s looking at the user to visually track them, and another camera looking at the ground to make sure it’s stabilized. Lily also requires a little tracking device you can slip into your pocket or strap onto your wrist. The tracking device has GPS and WiFi that communicates with the drone to make sure it knows where you are — it also has an accelerometer to track how fast you’re moving. The device also has a microphone for picking up sound around you.


Origin EON15-X review: You'll find a desktop CPU in this laptop, and that's a good thing
The EON15-X features two DisplayPorts along with an HDMI out. You get three USB 3.0, a Gigabit ethernet, and a combo USB and eSATA (remember those?) port, plus an SD card reader. There’s also a full set of analog audio ports along with SPDIF. Wireless is an Intel combo 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0. The keys have an odd sculpted shape to them that I’m not completely a fan of, but the trackpad isn’t bad. The lid on the laptop and top keyboard deck has a light rubberized coating too. It makes the laptop a little less slippery when hefting. The laptop weighs in at a hefty 7.7 pounds on your lap and pushes 10 with its power brick. You probably won’t lug it with you every day, but it’s manageable for hiking to your buddy’s house for an ad-hoc LAN party or bringing it to your relatives’ house to cut video.


IT suppliers call on new-look GDS for commitment to G-Cloud's future
“One of the most damaging things to all SMEs, and one that has hurt us personally, is the amount of change in G-Cloud over the years. More change at this time would be a bad thing,” she said. Since the framework’s introduction in February 2012, suppliers have had to deal with numerous changes, including a government-wide alteration to the way public sector data is classified in April 2014. Under the new system, public sector information is labelled Official, Secret and Top Secret, based on how sensitive it is, while the previous system was based on a sliding scale of impact levels. This used a scorecard system of zero to six to demonstrate the risk posed to the public sector should data fall into the wrong hands and was used by G-Cloud buyers to ascertain if the services being offered through the framework were equipped to cope with the levels of security they required.


Lean Start-Up, and How It Almost Killed Our Company
Start-ups work rather differently to how large companies run innovation projects. A big company with a portfolio of innovation products is the perfect place to implement the ‘little bets’ strategy – investing more in this seemingly-successful idea, killing off this poor one. For start-ups a poor innovation product is its only product. When it fails or delivers only a small revenue stream, there are a limited number of times that the start-up can pivot, or kill an idea and start again. Each independent start-up is its own ‘little bet’ – the market gains the benefit of the few that succeed, but that’s not much consolation for the 80% of start-ups that close within the first 3 years. Those that succeed will have a mixture of good ideas, good management, good funding and luck. The Lean Start-Up method fails to say much about the equally important, latter two.


Cybersecurity is a team sport
The US is ahead of Europe when it comes to integrating cybersecurity into its foreign and security policies. Europe would be foolish not to follow and learn from its example. As with most security issues, there are signs that in cybersecurity the default behavior for most European countries seems to be to follow the US approach. For the US, the biggest challenges at the moment are: updating all legal frameworks, strengthening cyber rules of engagement for the military, building cyber deterrents, and clarifying the roles and cooperation of the government and private sector. Europeans can learn from five main take-aways from the US’s new cyber strategy. Cybersecurity must be taken more seriously and planned strategically in Europe. The US’s strategy cybersecurity is more holistic and strategic than ever before.


Blended Analytics: That's What's Next for IT Mgmt
While leading vendors and startups alike have made significant progress in leveraging analytics for offering better IT operational insights, the available ITOA solutions still struggle to effectively deal with IT big data -- operating with a focus on data in narrow silos (APM, log etc.). To really reap the benefits and promise of analytics, IT decision makers need to break these silos and apply blended analytics, an approach that blends and analyzes major sources of IT information. Blended analytics can extract insights and draw intelligent correlations from a variety of data produced by multiple systems across IT silos. By analyzing a blend of data sources together IT Decision makers can see more than the individual components and finally get the whole picture.


The rise of Zombie Apps on the mobile landscape
The first and most obvious answer is to keep an eye on any outdated apps and remove them if you don't need them. If you're an Android user, you can install utilities such as Notification History or App Install History to keep track of when apps were last updated. On iOS 8, you can simply swipe from the top of your screen and tap "Notifications" to review your app update history. If you need an app for the functions it provides but its old and outdated it may be worth finding an alternative that is more recent and performs the same function. However, if you support multiple mobile devices, such as in an enterprise environment, you may need a better solution. Centralized mobile device management which provides the ability to analyze apps and find risks can come in handy. One such example of a solution is Appthority.


Google has an Android security problem
Android remains the most popular mobile operating system in the world with over 81 percent of the worldwide market share. But only a fraction of Android's share is running the software's latest version, with the latest bug fixes, vulnerability patches, and security updates. Official stats say just shy of 10 percent are using Android 5.0 "Lollipop," with about 39 percent running the second latest version, Android 4.4 "KitKat." That's a huge gap, but not close to even older versions. It's almost exactly split fifty-fifty down the middle between Android 4.3 and earlier -- including some 930 million devices that remain vulnerable to a security flaw Google won't fix, and Android 4.4 and later. With about two weeks until the next version is announced -- Android "M" -- the fragmentation problem is expected to get worse. And that means security will get worse.

---

Quote for the day:

"It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance." -- Thomas Huxley

---

May 14, 2015

Quentin Clark: SAP CTO. Technical helmsman. Runner.
"I think, as an industry, we're really only at the beginning of understanding how the cloud will dramatically change how businesses exist going forward," Clark said. Cloud technology has transformed the technology industry in two ways, Clark said. The first is in the delivery model. A lot of the early success of the cloud has to do with this model -- just think about how software, infrastructure, backend, and databases are delivered "as a service" now. It doesn't alter the foundational capability of the company, he said, but it does change how the company spends its energy and maintains its tools, which is still important. The second shift comes from the the things cloud computing has uniquely created and how they are altering the products and industries around them.


Cybersecurity Education Receives a Makeover
In part, experts say, it is society’s fault as people’s increasing desire and dependence on technology make it easier for criminals to hack their way toward profitable endeavors. “We certainly are in an area right now that has seen explosive growth with the Internet, but more importantly, we have, quite frankly, put our lives and our economy and our ways of interacting with business and friends and colleagues and everything into this digital world,” says Rob Roy, federal chief technology officer with HP Enterprise Security Products. “Sensitive information, intellectual property, financial information—that’s all in this brave new world that we’re living in, and it becomes extremely attractive to the three primary groups or individuals who want to use it for bad purposes.”


New Revenue Recognition Rules Require Software
There is a natural relation between principles-based accounting standards and software. In addition to ensuring consistency in treatment and facilitating governance and control, software also is capable of automating the process of presenting a company’s results from multiple perspectives in a consistent fashion. This is important because many companies will find that their statutory books alone will not provide the right numbers to manage their business. Although public company managements will want to see how their numbers look to Wall Street, they may find that these figures are inconsistent with business practices required to achieve sustainable long-term objectives. Software can systematize the simultaneous translation of events into increasingly divergent financial and management accounting contexts.


Are you the wrong type of “engaged” leader?
After all, when leaders consistently connect with their team members in a positive way, they create an environment of open communication. This connectivity has positive business results as well: the DDI survey indicated that “plugged in” leaders had three times less turnover and 83% led their teams to exceed their productivity goals. Yet there’s an irony at play. Consider for a moment two possible meanings of the word “engaged.” One is: to be thoroughly involved, as in, “the employees were highly engaged in the customer service rollout.” Then there is “busy or otherwise occupied.” In order to have the first type of engagement with your team, as a leader it’s necessary to forgo the second. Leadership places many demands on you; are you sending “I’m too busy” signals without knowing it?


The cybersecurity talent war you don't hear about
Finding the right Internet security guru can be as much a challenge as keeping your corporate data safe. Up to now, the hiring process for highly-skilled software engineers has often been haphazard, with some companies putting candidates through as many as 10 interviews, sometimes led by people without the skills to judge a candidate's talents. ... "We recruit global security researchers," said Kaplan. Like HackerRank, Synack tests candidates for the specific skills customers are seeking and does a thorough vetting, including face-to-face interviews. A test might consist of finding known vulnerabilities in a mock mobile-banking application. "This lets us determine if they are as good as they say," said Kaplan. "We weed out over 80 percent of candidates."


Fujitsu pushes wearable IoT tags that detect falls, heat stress
“These sensors stand out for the many business apps such as medicine or security that are easily incorporated through our cloud solutions,” said Tatsuhiro Ohira, a general manager in Fujitsu’s Ubiquitous Business Strategy Unit. As an extension of a company’s awareness of its staff, the tags could raise privacy concerns. Fujitsu said the wristbands could also be used to estimate whether the wearer is taking breaks, or to help manage workers’ health. The sensors are to be rolled out beginning in December but the cost has not been determined yet, Ohira said. Ubiquitousware has also been implemented in the latest version of Fujitsu’s head-mounted display for workers. The device has a 0.4-inch display in front of one eye for looking at assembly manuals, as well as a camera, microphones and sensors such as an accelerometer to detect falls.


Venom vulnerability bares its fangs: Protect your data center with these patches
According to Petr Matousek at Red Hat, "This flaw arises because of an unrestricted indexed write access to the fixed size FIFO memory buffer that FDC emulation layer uses to store commands and their parameters." Some commands in QEMU's virtual FDC fail to reset the index in a timely manner, or even at all -- in which case, further writes made to the FDC can become out-of-bounds. As the attacker has full control over the stored values and nearly full control of the write length, this can be exploited to allow arbitrary commands to be executed from inside the host virtualization process. Of particular importance, this vulnerability is independent of both the host and guest operating systems. Linux guests would require root access to interact with the FDC, and thereby exploit the vulnerability.


Surprise: More Cloud Benefits Are Emerging
Significant organizational efficiencies start when a company goes from managing different technology architectures (Wintel, Linux, RISC-based Unix, disk storage, tape storage, etc.) to simply managing the cloud. Though the streamlining of architecture management may not be significant during initial adoption, it becomes more noticeable as larger portions of the IT infrastructure have migrated. The further an enterprise moves toward a full cloud migration, the more benefits it will reap from managing an increasingly simplified and homogenized environment. Some of the earliest adopters of public IaaS, particularly those in industries not subject to heavy security and regulatory requirements, are seeing significant reductions in staffing, not all of which were obvious when they were writing that first cloud business case.


CIO interview: Hans-Petter Aanby, Scandinavian Airlines
All our infrastructure is new, including a new datacentre in Aarhus run by Danish communications provider TDC.” Not everything can be handled by external service providers though. “It is difficult to outsource the technical expertise required for airline-specific systems such as Amadeus – for reservations – and flight operations systems," says Aanby. "It makes sense for us retain that technical expertise in-house.”  He says SAS’s part of industry network Star Alliance adds challenges when changing systems. “Although being part of Star Alliance is an important strategic move for the company, it adds to the complexity within IT. To change one of the shared products, we must discuss specifications with 26 other airlines."


Applying the Irari Rules to a risk-based security program
The Irari Rules are intended to give someone with minimal technical competence —as is the case with most people in the media — the ability to ask, “Does this attack really meet the criteria of a ‘sophisticated’ attack? Was this an unpreventable attack, or the sign of an unsophisticated security program?” And though the Irari Rules don’t specifically take risk into account, a security professional looking at them should evaluate which of the countermeasures implied by the rules are really too difficult or too expensive to implement. Keeping anti-malware signatures up to date? Having a good password policy? Not having proper network segmentation? When looked at that way, we would argue, most of the implied countermeasures should be mandatory.

---

Quote for the day:

“Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.” -- Reed Markham

---

May 13, 2015

3D tech brings big data analytics to crime scene investigations
The traditional method of crime scene reconstruction and evidence gathering involves an initial walkthrough and photo documentation. In the course of this investigation, it is critical not to remove or move items at the scene, because any disturbance can call the evidence's validity into question; the evidence must be accepted as tamper proof in order to be authenticated and admitted in court. It's not easy to do. Investigators and forensics experts use total stations, which are portable crime scene mapping units that combine software, hardware, and data collecting sensors into an integrated mapper that records and maps evidence data points. 3D laser scanning technology is providing crime scene investigators with new analytics capabilities.


How Corporate Culture Impedes Data Innovation
Companies able to realize the most benefit from their data are aligning their visions, corporate mindsets, performance measurement, and incentives to effect widespread cultural change. They are also more transparent than similar organizations, meaning that a wide range of personnel has visibility into the same data, and data is commonly shared among departments, or even across the entire enterprise. "Transparency doesn't come naturally," Gilbert said. "Companies don't tend to share information as much as they should." Encouraging exploration is also key. Companies that give data access to more executives, managers, and employees than they did in the past have to also remove limits that may be driven by old habits. For example, some businesses discourage employees from exploring the data and sharing their original observations.


Web-Based Transient Detection Can Enhance Data Center Electrical System
Implementing a web-based transient detection monitoring system can contribute to more effective management of the electrical system. By combining surge suppression hardware and dedicated software that proactively monitors and measures the data center’s electrical system, it can provide a way to detect the occurrence of abnormal power quality events. This provides knowledge about data center management that can be used to predict and address potential problems before they happen. The combined technology goes beyond what is typically available with standard power meters. This type of advanced transient detection system can give the ability to monitor RMS voltage real-time at every connected panel.


Peering Into Computing’s Exascale Future with the IEEE
There is no shortage of “lunatic fringe” computer architectures. What is lacking, Conte and others assert, is the willingness to risk a fundamental overhaul in order to transform computing. It will take a public-private partnership, the IEEE group maintains. Along with the “Three Pillars” of energy efficiency, new user interfaces and “dynamic security,” the list of possible computing approaches ranges from “neuromorphic” and “approximate” computing to adiabatic, or “reversible,” computing to variations on parallelism. Quantum computing, which has attracted much investment, shows promise, Conte agreed. “It’s going to have it’s own niche,” he added, “its own node in the cloud. But it’s not low power.” A more promising approach, one Conte thinks could fundamentally transform computing, is HP Labs’ “The Machine.”


Cyber Attacks on News Organizations: ISIS Changes Tactics to Win Mindshare
Newsrooms are inherently vulnerable as they do not house strong teams of Information Security personnel, nor do they generally possess the world-class tools and architectures needed to defend against sophisticated cyber-attacks. A typical network security tool newsrooms have is perimeter protection, a technology that is an eroding concept. They need to review the impact of today’s standard application security approaches, such as the growing use of cloud technology that can help protect against top-level attacks such as advanced persistent threats, intrusions, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and other forms of highly technical attacks. To properly defend themselves, newsrooms need to implement a much more robust security fabric with higher levels or processes and security.


The rise of the Internet police
The policing requires human intervention because Facebook's systems are only trained to spot and automatically eliminate images showing child exploitation. For everything else, Facebook's teams wait for alerts to come to them. Users can register complaints and call out spam, harassment, hate speech or sexually explicit content. Because it only takes two clicks to begin a report, users frequently point out bad behavior. "It's one of the reasons we make it so easy to report," says Silver. Facebook processes about 1 million legitimate complaints every week -- a sliver of the site's posts. It's not perfect, and the company doesn't identify everything. "It's hard, and at scale, it's impossible," says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace."


Gordon Moore is still amazed at how Moore's Law shaped the tech industry
“The fact that something has gone on for 50 years is truly amazing,” Moore said. Friedman tried to get Moore to predict when the law would run out of steam, but the most Moore would allow is that it could go on for possibly another five years. Moore said he was amazed at how the advances in computing had spawned offshoots from free Internet services to self-driving cars. Though he was the chief technical officer of Intel when he submitted his predictions to Electronics, Moore said he was trained as a chemist, not as a futurist. ‘We’ve just seen the beginning of what computers are going to do for us,” Moore said.  “We’re seeing an evolution in the intelligence of machines,” Moore said. “This is not happening in one step, but in a whole bunch of increments. I never thought I’d see autonomous cars driving down the freeway.”


5 Secrets to DevOps Success
‘BMI’ is one metric used to track your adoption to a good balance in life. Likewise, assessing your adoption of DevOps practices can be a good metric to tracking the proper balance in IT. In light of the challenges that many organizational are facing to achieve the right balance of DevOps, IDC recently released a survey that tracks progress of and barriers to implementing DevOps. They found that IT teams advanced with DevOps adoption in different dimensions at different times: people, culture, technology, business and process. While the people, technology, and process elements evolved along a common trajectory, the culture and business sides prove to be more complex. When implementing DevOps practices and guiding teams to automate incident management, there are five major areas that IT leaders should consider to make sure the right balance is achieved between business needs and cultural development:


Everything you need to know about iCloud Drive
Accessing iCloud Drive on iOS has to be done through individual apps. To open a file from iCloud, you must first tap the icon for the compatible app, such as Pages or Keynote. Within the app, tap the + icon and then tap iCloud. A window will open displaying the contents of your iCloud Drive. Tap the icon of the folder that contains the file you want to access and tap the file name. A copy of the file will then open in the app on your iOS device. If you want to send a file to iCloud from your iOS device start with the file you want to send and tap the Share icon (the one that looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it). Tap "Send a Copy" and select the file type you want to export it as. Then tap "iCloud Drive" and tap the name of the folder you want to save it to. When prompted tap "Export to this location" and your file will be saved to iCloud Drive.


Software detects fake mobile, Wi-Fi networks
A technically skilled person could probably build a fake cellular tower for around $350, while a non-technical person could assemble one for around $1,500, Liwer said. For enterprises with sensitive data, the lower barrier to intercepting mobile communications poses yet another risk to data. CoroNet’s software is a lightweight agent that runs on an Android or iOS device or on a laptop. It is programmed to detect behaviors and characteristics of a base station, as well as those of Wi-Fi networks. It turns out that fake ones leave a lot of clues that they’re probably bogus. ... “Based on that pattern, we know that is probably suspicious behavior,” Liwer said. “A safe network would never behave this way.” If a mobile network looks suspicious, CoroNet can cut off the connection to the fake base station and route the call to the legitimate one.

---

Quote for the day:

“Some men see things as they are and say "why." I dream things that never were and say "why not.” -- Robert F. Kennedy

---

May 12, 2015

Microsoft bids for security edge with new browser
Microsoft Edge is designed to run only 64-bit processes on 64-bit machines. According to Microsoft, 64-bit processes get significant security advantages by making Windows address space layout randomisation (ASLR) stronger. Microsoft SmartScreen, originally introduced in IE8, is supported in Microsoft Edge and by the Windows 10 Shell. SmartScreen defends users against phishing sites by performing a reputation check on sites the browser visits, blocking those thought to be phishing sites “Similarly, SmartScreen in both the browser and the Windows Shell defends users against socially engineered downloads of malicious software to users being tricked into installing malicious software,” said Cowan. Finally, developers say the Microsoft EdgeHTML rendering engine in Microsoft Edge helps in defending against “con man” attacks using new security features in HTML5.


2020 Technology Landscape
Each year, the Citrix Technology Office updates the industry on the latest technology trends with our Technology Landscape. Citrix makes sense of the changes driving these trends, correlating surveys and data from industry sources in addition to adding in Citrix perspectives and data. This year’s landscape is themed “Creating Your Future” and focuses on the many facets of innovation from lean startup, design thinking, and agile development to the outliers of innovation being developed by tech influencers around the globe. We’ve distilled the predictions we think you’ll find most interesting and highlighted them below.


Quantum computing is about to overturn cybersecurity’s balance of power
As do all advancing technologies, they will also create new nightmares. The most worrisome development will be in cryptography. Developing new standards for protecting data won’t be easy. The RSA standards that are in common use each took five years to develop. Ralph Merkle, a pioneer of public-key cryptography, points out that the technology of public-key systems, because it is less well-known, will take longer to update than these — optimistically, ten years. And then there is a matter of implementation so that computer systems worldwide are protected. Without a particular sense of urgency or shortcuts, Merkle says, it could easily be 20 years before we’ve replaced all of the Internet’s present security-critical infrastructure. It is past time we began preparing for the spooky technology future we are rapidly heading into.


Why virtual reality could finally mend its broken promise
There's a graveyard of virtual reality projects that have fizzled, failed, and flopped at various stages of existence. Some never made it off the patent page, like Heilig's 1960 Telesphere Mask. Others got further — if you're of a certain age, you might have owned a Nintendo Virtual Boy for the brief time it was projecting its red and black display onto young retinas. Then, of course, there's Sega VR, which never made it to market. ... "To me, virtual reality represents an evolution of the ways in which we can display, present, and interact with computer generated data and real world environments with augmented reality," Jacobson said. And if you're thinking that's one way to hint at brain implants, then you'd be right. "I think that's the next step after after eyewear, glasses, contacts—a direct brain interface where we think our reality," Papagiannis said.


Key steps to reducing the shadow cloud threat
Shadow cloud can easily lead to wasted time, energy and investments in traditional IT. If employees use non-approved technology, wasted efforts can include training on approved technologies, security technology policies that don't touch shadow cloud, audits and investigations that provide less accurate or effective results, incidents and response efforts due to unapproved technology, help desk and support needed, and bypasses of technology/security controls altogether. ... CISOs must explain risk-based granular security policies and enforcement for cloud implementations to business managers. In turn, business managers need to get the security team to understand how business processes should and shouldn't work when they want to use cloud services. Addressing allowed and disallowed use of cloud services in a policy is the first step to controlling shadow cloud.


What hybrid cloud? It's hybrid IT
"In reality, hybrid cloud has very little to do with datacenter location or data sovereignty. It is where processes increasingly require functionality that spans multiple cloud services," he explained. "Everything we do in business is unlikely to be fully available from just one cloud or even just one cloud provider." He noted that operating a modern business is complex, and supporting all functions necessary in a process typically means deploying several clouds from multiple providers across different geographic locations. These would then have to be brokered, integrated, and orchestrated, he said, giving rise to concerns about how this should be managed. ... "Many IT services firms see their future as a new form of intermediary to provide that single point of accountability, while they deal with the back end of multiple cloud services," Hayward explained.


Shaping Big Data Through Constraints Analysis
The trick is to establish the size and heft of the data, and then focus on how it flows. Computers really do only two things: read data in and write data out. Performance is a function of how much data must move, and where, to accomplish a task. That’s not a facile slogan; it’s a consequence of the fundamental theorem of computing. Every computer is equivalent to a Turing Machine, and all a Turing Machine does is move symbols around a tape. Its throughput is bounded by how fast it can move symbols. This consequence holds true from the micron-sized guts of the CPU on up to world-spanning distributed databases. Luckily, the math is straightforward.


Global banking IT group completes standardised IT architecture
The standard will support banks in using application programming interfaces so different pieces of software can interact. It moves away from an approach that has seen core banking IT built in silos. “Bian members have worked tirelessly to develop this global banking IT standard that will support banks to overcome legacy IT issues and drastically cut the cost of technology integration. To have finalised the model ready for implementation into banks around the globe is a momentous occasion," said Bian executive director Hans Tesselaar. "By implementing this on a worldwide scale, banks will be able to develop and on-board innovative technology offerings without battling through ageing or tangled enterprise architecture, and at lower integration costs.”


Financial technology will make banks more vulnerable and less profitable“Silicon Valley is coming,” warned Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s boss, in a recent letter to shareholders. “There are hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking.” Banks’ cost bases—IT systems, smart headquarters, staff, branches and so on—require income from a wide range of services. If even some of those services get “unbundled”, in the parlance of fintechers, the economic models that have sustained banks for decades will be under threat. So the incumbents pay lip-service to the newcomers, and some even have in-house teams scouting for innovators to stop them from eating their lunch. Several factors have made the banks more vulnerable. New technologies such as smartphones and cheap data processing have lowered barriers to entry. However, “technology is necessary but not sufficient” to change attitudes towards finance, says Mike Cagney of SoFi


What the Cowardly Lion and data scientists have in common
Courage is one of those unexpected ingredients of data science that usually becomes an unpleasant aha moment for leaders in the middle of strategy implementation. Courage is the fuel for experimentation and, without experimentation, there is no data science. But it's more than experimentation in the scientific sense. To succeed, programmers need to take risks with code; mathematicians need to reinvent math; and data artists need to color outside of the lines. Intellectually, data scientists know this, but their personality doesn't generally support taking risks, so they don't. ...  They have the unique ability to calculate the risk of taking any route, and they're smart enough to know when something probably won't work. Data scientists also hate it when something they try doesn't work, so they don't attempt to answer the question.

---

Quote for the day:

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake. You can't learn anything from being perfect. -- Adam Osborne

---

May 11, 2015

How Agile Has Changed Test Management
In previous times, test strategies were quite often weighty tomes used to capture everything a test manager knew about testing, their magnum opus. After creation they would be put on display for a bit before being placed carefully on the shelf and forgotten about. Test strategies, even documented ones, are still very relevant in agile teams. They often require very broad and deep knowledge of testing to drive good behaviours, which is the domain of the test manager. The trick is to treat them as living documentation, that live, breathe and grow along with the teams and people who use them. This means keeping them concise, usable, appropriate and written in a format and medium that encourages regular use, extension and amendment as ways of working change.

Know your cyber enemy inside and out
Most information security programs are fully aware of their enemy. Threat actors: hacktivists, organised criminals, nation states and opportunists are well known and documented, so you would think you are well on the way to victory. The problem is many companies and individuals stop there. Their focus resides on the outside, trying to stop the enemy getting in. But what about the inside? Think back to Sun Tzu's teachings “... know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time”. In other words, if you don't look at the threat from the inside then you are fighting a losing battle. ... It's worth noting that the “insider threat” is not necessarily a “rogue administrator” or “Edward Snowden”. It could be a loyal member of staff or contractor who fell fowl to a social engineering exercise and left the company open to attack because they had more access than they needed.

'Never ask a question if you don't know the answer is yes': How to present to the board
"Users have been seduced by the ease and simplicity with which they can download an app and use it to meaningful purpose. We live in an app-centric world, inhabited by people with a short attention span and with their fires stoked by expectations of performance, simplicity, usability, and - most importantly - cost." Behenna says the level of expectation associated to IT has ratcheted up exponentially. And the associated democratisation of technical knowledge has upped the pressure on CIOs to present concisely, consistently, and with absolute clarity to the board. "Apply the well-tested psychologies of usability, customer and user experience, and employ the best of those methodologies. Keep the detail in the hand-out you distribute to the board before the presentation, and use your allotted time wisely and precisely to paint a compelling picture and story," says Behenna.


The 'Internet Of Me' Is Getting Real In Healthcare
Connected technology in the context of healthcare provides the opportunity to gather the data necessary to create such personalized treatments. "It's about the Internet of Me," Karaboutis said, citing partnerships with Google and FitBit designed to help multiple sclerosis patients. "That's where we're going with this industry [in terms of technology]." At Biogen, traditional enterprise IT functions continue to be important, said Karaboutis, but the mandate for the technology organization extends to enabling the scientific and computational work that improves people's lives. "Healthcare is changing," said Karaboutis. "It's no longer about treating symptoms. It's about outcomes." Supporting that goal as a technology organization isn't necessarily straightforward. Karaboutis says the IT group has to understand the study of science and the cultural differences between technology and science.


How the tech industry is redesigning the future workplace
Tech has grown out of the garage. The audacious scale of these spaces is a bid at bettering the odds of the serendipitous encounters - bumps in Silicon Valley vernacular - which helped Building 20's occupants share ideas across specialisms. Shiny new workplaces are springing up from San Francisco to Shoreditch and Shenzhen. It 's not just technology behemoths who have embraced this way of working. The BBC's new Broadcasting House, for example, encourages hot desking, with 460 workstations in its open-plan newsroom alone. But this brave new world of work has critics. For some, open plan spaces suggest managers on the room's sidelines, watching workers huddled in the middle like prey on the African savannah.


4 warning signs that your team is not agile
But agile productivity typically depends upon the quality of the team members. It requires high IQ, high EQ, and high focus. Put someone in with insufficient subject matter expertise, drive, or decision-making authority, and the team will be chasing its tail. Further, agile depends upon the impedance match between the resources and the tasks: if a team member just doesn’t care, or can’t stand to be in the room with another team member, close collaboration simply won’t happen. Since agile is all about flexibility and fast iterations, it would be a joke if you did not assess the members of the agile team as early and often as possible to detect and correct the problem children. Fail-fast on team assignments is a best practice. If, as the Zen masters say, “how you do anything is how you do everything,” it should be possible to detect team membership issues before the first sprint has completed. Ideally, you could do that before the first sprint has started. But how?


IBM Bluemix Welcomes Microsoft's .Net
Bluemix was among the first platforms-as-a-service, or integrated sets of development tools on an online platform. Launched in February 2014 as a publicly available service and available to developers on a trial basis well before that, Bluemix has been the IBM world's rival to Microsoft's Azure with its Visual Studio online tools and Google App Engine with its Python and Java options. Bluemix is currently adding 8,000 developers a week to its total body of active users, Angel Diaz, VP of IBM Cloud architecture and technology, said in an interview with InformationWeek. ... Working with Microsoft, as of May 11 IBM has added to Bluemix a .Net Buildpack or set of tools, along with the .Net runtime, giving developers a wide mix of options: Java, the dynamic, interpreted languages (Ruby, PHP, and Python), and C and C# for the first time, said Diaz.


Interview and Book Review: BDD In Action
Many BDD practices can be useful for both agile and more prescriptive development processes. For example, writing acceptance criteria in a way that can be turned into executable form (or "executable specifications") can help ensure that the acceptance criteria are unambiguous and of high quality, though the feedback and review cycles may be slower if there is less face-to-face collaboration between the BAs and the other team members during the definition of these requirements. That said, an agile process gives the team more scope to manage uncertainty and to adapt to their evolving understanding of the requirements and the solution they are building, and practices like the 3 amigos and collaboratively defined acceptance criteria are great ways to flush out uncertainty in the requirements.


EMC: Rise of third platform could spell end for businesses unwilling to adapt
EMC’s messaging on this topic echoes the urgent rhetoric suppliers used to spout about cloud computing five or so years ago, when it was commonplace to hear organisations being warned about the business risks of ignoring the shift to off-premise technologies. While many of these early declarations called on users to act immediately, they soon gave way to a softer stance from the supplier community, as real-world tales about the challenges of moving to the cloud started to emerge. As such, proclamations like “adopt cloud or die” gave way to more measured statements that still emphasised the importance of moving away from on-premise technologies, but to an extent and at a pace that was best for the business.


The rapid rise of smartphone health care
While the MyOnlineClinic platform is still in its pilot period, Collins hopes to launch the service generally in several markets around the world, with Asia standing out as a region ripe for such a service. According to Collins, many of the often elderly patients in Australia who have been using the existing telemedicine services in the country via their PCs are reasonably comfortable now with online consultations, but getting them to do the same thing on a smartphone could require a substantial change in behaviour for some people. "Changing Australian behaviour is very difficult," Collins told ZDNet. "But we haven't restricted ourselves to the Australian market. One of our main focuses is international markets. We're deploying in Thailand, for example. In terms of changing behaviour, in Asian countries, it's much easier."

---

Quote for the day:

"You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself." -- Gene Mauch

---