Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 19, 2016

How to Connect Cisco Nexus 9396PX to 40G Network

The traditional network usually used a three tier network architecture. However, with the migration of 40/100G, a new architecture is taking place of the traditional one with great advantages. This is known as spine-leaf architecture. ... In spine-leaf network architecture for 40G application, the connections between the spine switches and leaf switches are 40G, while connections between the leaf switches and servers are usually 1/10G. Thus these 40G QSFP+ ports can be used to connect the spine switch and the 1G SFP/10G SFP+ are suggested to connect servers and routers. To accomplish the whole spine-leaf connection, optics and cables or DAC (direct attach cable) should be used. The following picture shows a 40G spine-leaf architecture with Cisco Nexus 9396PX being used in the leaf layer and the fiber cabling choice for Cisco Nexus 9396PX switch in this architecture.

HPE IaaS reference architecture for SAP Business Applications

The solution blueprint outlined in this paper provides an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud infrastructure for SAP Business Applications under both traditional and SAP HANA In-Memory databases as the Cloud service. The platform provides the ease of use and flexibility needed to minimize the effort to bring legacy platforms to SAP HANA performance levels and addresses future needs coming with SAP’s newest software generation S/4HANA. The configurations are based on Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers, storage, networking and software. For customers that need maximum and dedicated database performance, this white paper describes a high performance configuration optimized for SAP HANA bare metal deployments and SAP Business Applications based on virtualization layers.

FlexPod and UCS – where are we now?

Recent announcements around the Gen 3 UCS Fabric Interconnects have revealed that 40GbE is now going to be the standard for UCS connectivity solutions, and the new chassis designs show 4 x 40GbE QSFP connections, totaling 320Gbps total bandwidth per chassis, this is an incredible throughput, and although I can’t see 99% of customers going anywhere near these levels, it does help to strengthen the UCS platform’s use cases for even the most high performance environments, and reduces the requirement for Infiniband type solutions for high throughput environments. Another interesting point, and following on from the ACI ramblings above, is that the new 6300 series Fabric Interconnects are now based on the Nexus 9300 switching line, rather than the Nexus 5K based 6200 series.

Jive prescribes collaboration software as best DNA match for healthcare

The theory here is: better collaboration could improve information, could improve patient care, could improve the fight against the nursing shortage the USA currently being experienced. According to a press statement, "Built on the cloud-based Jive-n interactive intranet, this solution improves the accessibility of nursing curriculum, best practices, specialised knowledge and peer-to-peer feedback amongst nursing educators, professionals and students." Oregon was the first US state to implement a statewide, multi-campus consortium approach for nursing education and OCNE's collaborative online community is claimed to be the first of its kind.

Getting Started with Blockchain

Blockchains are going to be useful wherever there is a need for a trustworthy record, something which is pretty vital for transactions of all sorts whether it be in banking, for legal documents or for registries of things like land or high value art works etc. Startups such as Stampery are looking to use blockchain technology to provide low cost certification services. Blockchain is not just for pure startups however. Twenty-five banks are part of the blockchain company, called R3 CEV, which aims to develop common standards around this technology. R3 CEV’s Head of Technology is Richard Gendal Brown an ex-colleague from IBM.

Open Blockchain

OBC is a modular-based protocol for recording and accessing transactions on a private ledger. Transactions, in this context, can have a wide definition, ranging from data to assets, instructions, and identities. A system that combines both the transactional processing protocol and the information store is a big advantage for multiple domains. For example, the protocol is modular so network administrators can define their own constraints and then set the protocol accordingly. This open source fabric allows infinite sets of unique actors to create their own networks. Communities create a permissioned network, where validating and non-validating nodes are operated by known whitelisted entities. These identities are granted access by an issuing authority on the network. This model is substantially different from current blockchains.

Identity theft, fraudsters, and what to know to prevent an attack

One of the pitfalls to keeping up with security trends, Platt said, "Is that there is a certain pace that organizations work at and putting changes in place can be difficult. You have to be able to make changes immediately, so you always want systems that can be changed and modified at the pace of fraud not at the pace of IT organizations." The pace of attacks has increased through technology, and according to Platt, "Some studies say that up to one-third of all traffic online is non-human." Innovation is driving change at a rapid pace, but while the technology available to people in the security industry is fast, it is changing just as fast for the bad guys. Platt said, "The pace of innovation is helping all of us so that every new attack can be identified and stopped."

BPM tools now used for complex event processing architecture

The events in the context of BPM can be internal events defined, generated or processed within the BPM tool. Examples include the instantiation or completion of a dynamic case or service levels. For example, when an assigned task is late, it is a temporal event that needs to be handled through escalation. The temporal aspect is extremely important in event processing, especially the occurrence and relationship of multiple events in a temporal window. Events can also be external, such as financial transaction events, device or machine-monitoring events and social media events. "Core intelligent complex event capabilities are becoming part of the unified BPM platform that supports intelligence holistically," Khoshafian said.

The Enterprise Architect is no Project Manager though it can be

The architect structures the description of the enterprise, establishes principles for change and evolution, standards for technologies, the roadmap... with the final aim to enable change, decision making and manage, if not reduce, the unnecessary and costly complexity and variation in the enterprise. The PM, having been given the architecture, dependencies, roadmap, risks, the work breakdown, skills and resources necessary and deliverables and acceptance criteria has to come up with a project plan and iterate it until the schedule, resources and costs are all coming together. The PM has then to monitor and report progress, bottlenecks, risks eventuation, organise meetings..

How Cognitive Computing Can Get Businesses Up And Running After Disasters

In the cognitive era, the continuous availability of data, systems, applications and business processes is essential. Organizations will take for granted that these services are “always on.” By applying advanced analytics and automation to predict potential issues, companies can correct systems in advance. At IBM, we are investing in new capabilities to help clients move from reactive business continuity and disaster recovery planning to a cognitive and predictive resiliency program. The goal is to avoid the impact of a disaster before it occurs. What if we could crunch weather data to predict the potential impact of severe weather and prompt appropriate action?

Quote for the day:

"Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities." -- Leon Kass

March 16, 2016

10 Ways Virtual Reality is Disrupting Industries

Today we have different types of equipment or gears which facilitate our experience of this simulated environment. Take, for instance, the Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Sony Morpheus VR headset or Samsung Gear VR. All these head mounted display (HMD) devices have magnified the mass interest and hype around virtual reality, bringing it out of animated series or video games, and into our living rooms. Today, this technology and its applications are proving revolutionary for almost every industry, and the world as a whole! Let’s understand the enormous ways in which VR is transforming the world and disrupting many different industries.

Is this the end of the API economy?

A gateway like this is an important element in API-focused service strategy. You can use it to handle user authentication, and then once user tokens have been exchanged, route calls to an appropriately provisioned endpoint. Is a user a subscriber, and at what level? If they're paying for a service, check how many calls they've made from their allocation, and deliver an appropriate error message if they've used their allocation so they can purchase more or upgrade a subscription to account for changes in user patterns. That doesn't mean returning a 200 OK message, it means delivering an appropriate and documented JSON response to ensure that applications are able to report errors to users.

TechUK to spotlight cyber threat intelligence

“The bottom line is that threat intelligence is only as good as the countermeasures that it informs, and that has got to be our ultimate goal,” Young said, calling on security organisations to join the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA). A key part of informing countermeasures, said Rajab, is applying human intelligence and experience once the technology has sifted through the data to identify what needs further investigation. Similar to the CTA, TechUk considers it very important that threat intelligence is shared in the information security community for the benefit of all. “We have set up Trusted Agents Forum, which enables TechUk members to share threat intelligence and analysis. It is only through sharing threat intelligence and best practice that companies can better protect themselves,” said Rajab.

Debating Disruptive Innovation

It is critical that boards of directors and senior management understand when following accepted principles of good management (such as paying attention to your best customers and focusing investments where you can increase profit margins) leads to failure. Christensen demonstrated that those accepted management principles are only situationally appropriate. That insight can be used not only to avoid failure but also to go on offense to displace competitors. Identifying and harnessing disruptive innovations to avoid failure and to grow shareholder value became far more attainable once Christensen identified the essential elements of a disruptive innovation — a phenomenon previously unnoticed.

How Businesses and Governments Can Capitalize on Blockchain

While blockchain is the core technology that enables the Bitcoin crypto currency to operate, it can be used for entirely different purposes. It’s a distributed ledger shared via a peer-to-peer network that maintains an ever-expanding list of data records. Each participant has an exact copy of the ledger’s data, and additions to the chain are propagated throughout the network. Therefore, all participants in an interaction have an up-to-date ledger that reflects the most recent transactions or changes. In this way, Blockchain reduces the need for establishing trust using traditional methods. ... For blockchain to fulfill its full potential, it must be based on non-proprietary technology standards to assure the compatibility and interoperability of systems.

The downside of relying on social network providers for authentication

Relying on the social media giants helps both users and application developers. Users don't need to create yet another account and remember yet another set of credentials (my 1Password vault already has 176 entries in it). Application developers can skip implementing authentication, identity and password management. However, relying on a third-party identity service such as Facebook or Twitter also has its downsides. The application developer must make an assumption that the user has an account with those systems. The developer also must take it for granted that the third-party system is stable and reliable.

The Future of Jobs in a Machine World

Unlike the disruptions of yesteryear where technologies replaced simple repetitive Blue Collar job functions near the bottom of the Skills and Complexity Pyramid they’re now starting to replace White Collar knowledge workers near the top. The result is an increasingly nervy global workforce and for the first time ever a squeezed middle who are becoming increasingly worried about their lack of specialisms and skills. The technologies that will have the greatest impact and influence on the job markets can be divided into two groups. “Individual Emerging Technologies” such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Vision and hardware and software based Robots and “Aggregated Emerging Technologies” that combine different technologies together to create platforms that include Autonomous Vehicles, Avatars, Cloud, Connected Home, the Internet of Everything, Smarter Cities, Wearables and Telehealth.

The 9 Challenges of an Industrial IoT Implementation (Part 1)

While industry reports provide some guidance, there is no straightforward answer as to which of these areas will yield the most short or mid-term benefits and should take priority. To name just a couple, Consultancy McKinsey, in its 2015 Report, Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things, suggests that manufacturers stand to gain the most in making industrial processes more efficient. On the other hand, research firm Forrester, in its August 2015 paper The Internet of Things Has the Potential to Connect and Transform Businesses, counsels companies not to focus too heavily on potential efficiency gains from IoT, lest they “miss out on the potential of IoT to transform business models”. While there is no one size fits all, the answer to the question of where to start can be found by each company through a diligent and coordinated approach.

Chinese hackers behind U.S. ransomware attacks - security firms

"It is obviously a group of skilled of operators that have some amount of experience conducting intrusions," said Phil Burdette, who heads an incident response team at Dell SecureWorks. Burdette said his team was called in on three cases in as many months where hackers spread ransomware after exploiting known vulnerabilities in application servers. From there, the hackers tricked more than 100 computers in each of the companies into installing the malicious programs. The victims included a transportation company and a technology firm that had 30 percent of its machines captured. Security firms Attack Research, InGuardians and G-C Partners, said they had separately investigated three other similar ransomware attacks since December. Although they cannot be positive, the companies concluded that all were the work of a known advanced threat group from China, Attack Research Chief Executive Val Smith told Reuters.

Security via the cloud can ease digital transformation by reducing IT headaches

The rise of cloud-based services is coming at a time when many firms have been struggling to attract and retain skilled cyber security staff. Mistry from Trend Micro said this is particularly true for smaller firms, where IT staffing budgets can be very limited, thus making the ability to outsource cloud security especially appealing. “For businesses that have a limited headcount, in an environment where IT professionals are required to wear multiple hats, this allows some of the maintenance tasks to be reduced,” he said. “This includes network appliances such as firewalls, and also the full-time employee (FTE) staffing costs for the upkeep of security infrastructure. With security as a service, organisations can now use security software without the headache of maintenance. SMEs also favour security as a service for the reasons outlined."

Quote for the day:

"Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers." -- Colin Powell

March 15, 2016

Information security and the art of business enablement

For any business, decisions about what actions need to be taken from a security perspective should be based on risk, as opposed to an ad hoc approach to prioritizing fixes. For example, TLS 1.0, a web cryptography protocol, has a vulnerability allowing it to be exploited by the POODLE attack. That being said, it is not considered a critical exposure for most organizations. The PCI Security Standards Council for instance, is not requiring the removal of TLS 1.0 for existing installations until June, 2016. Were I assessing risks for an organization, this would probably not be the top item on my list. When using a risk-based approach to vulnerability management, the challenge is in properly assessing the business risk of a given vulnerability. This is where a CISO with knowledge of the business side as well as the technology side comes in.

How to Respond to Ransomware Threats

Ransomware is obviously analogous to kidnapping, and dealing with the perpetrators can feel much like negotiating with a jumper standing on the edge of high-rise roof.The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology recently released a report that in part describes how to deal with criminals when they are holding your data hostage. The report talks of what to do once a breach has been found. ICIT says the proper response will depend on the risk tolerance of the organization, the potential impact of the hostage data, the impact on business continuity, whether a redundant system is available, and regulatory requirements.

Is cloud computing facilitating poor security practices?

The single most common mistake users of public cloud make is to not read their contracts and understand where their responsibilities truly lie. Often people are unclear as to when and how the creation of a server in the cloud moves from the care and security of the provider to them. I’ve run into folks who mistakenly thought their cloud provider was patching servers through some back door for them. They weren’t; and the servers went unpatched for months. Often organisations will forget that the layer of management given to them by the cloud provider will also need some security. The administrative users and rights used to configure and control the cloud systems will need to be treated just as carefully as any other privileged users in their systems.

Embracing open source - An expert look at the cutting edge of corporate technology

Variety speaks to how open source used to be confined to software – programming that could be improved or adjusted to fit different business needs – but has now evolved into hardware IP, like specs, servers, and data center designs. Volume speaks to the amount of open source content that's available, which has grown astronomically in the past few years. Major growth in volume is largely due to the fact that open source IP isn't just created by individuals anymore – it's created by huge corporations, too. Open source also must be viewed in terms of velocity, or how quickly it develops everyday use-cases. Duet says that open source is now fully permeated in technology, and points to the rise of the Internet of Things – made possible by the ability to analyze disparate data sets on a massive scale – as a triumph of open source philosophy.

Change Management: Building a Case for Cloud-Based ERP

If moving to public cloud or hosted services seems intimidating by adding another factor into the mix amid or replacing on-premise infrastructure, a paradigm shift is in order – necessary to stay competitive and lean in a world shifting to accommodate more outsourced options and the agility found in the cloud. Complicating things further, those now making the move are presented with options – options that improve the quality of cloud overall, but create an initial dilemma as leaders oscillate between service providers and products, debating which areas of their business to migrate when and where. Meanwhile, more and more applications build upon on another within increasingly complex and intricately interdependent environments.

Will WebSocket survive HTTP/2?

The browsers opens several HTTP 1.x connections in parallel to speedup the page loading. Browsers have different limits on maximum concurrent connections they can open on a domain but they generally support around 6 different connections. To overcome this limitation, techniques such as Domain sharding can be used to distribute resources across several domains. These techniques (that we can consider as hacks) including concatenating JavaScript and CSS files, spriting images and resource inlining will be counter-productive in a HTTP/2 world. This is probably one of the main impacts when considering to switch to HTTP/2: eliminate optimization/hacks made during several years. When trying with HTTP/2, we see the browser use a single multiplexed connection with a much faster load time.

What can your ISP really see and know about you?

Some high-profile ISPs were not pleased after the FCC proposed rules (pdf) to give broadband consumers more privacy. To dispute the notion that ISPs are “somehow uniquely positioned in the Internet ecosystem,” AT&T wants you read Georgia Institute of Technology professor Peter Swire’s paper titled “Online Privacy and ISPs: ISP Access to Consumer Data is Limited and Often Less than Access by Others.” Although Swire’s paper may be used to assist the FCC as it decides how to handle broadband privacy, the same paper was criticized for technical inaccuracies by Princeton professor Nick Feamster before Feamster revised his statement to say Swire’s paper skips over “important additional facts that should be considered by policymakers.”

Project Management Gloassary

The project management field spans 10 interconnected knowledge areas and incorporates the use of 47 processes organized into five process groups (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and close-out) -- making it a complex field to understand and navigate. As project management is applied within small businesses to large multi-national organizations and to virtually any industry in some form, anyone from the CEO of a large international organization to employees within a small business can benefit from understanding these PM terms. Since project management involves careful planning, execution and management of people, processes, timelines, deliverables, technologies and other resources in a way that aligns with overall strategic objectives, successfully executing a project, can be almost impossible absent the understanding of these PM terms.

IoT “plug and pray” all over again, says security consultant

The unwillingness of manufacturers to address security issues, he said, is illustrated by Trane, which was alerted to serious security flaws in its ComfortLink II thermostat in April 2014, including hard-coded SSH passwords, and yet this particular issue was only fixed a year later, and the company took a further eight months to address the remaining vulnerabilities. “When [Trane] eventually did fix the vulnerabilities it did not alert customers, so this is a classic example of the problems people are facing, where they have these devices, they don’t know they are insecure, and they are not made aware when is a software update to make them secure,” said Alexander. He also pointed out consumers should be aware that there is money to be made from data, and that electronics manufacturers have found a way to make consumers pay to put devices in their homes that will give the device makers data that will make them money.

Data traffic jam? Top performance requires worldwide Internet intelligence

If your customers in Berlin are experiencing performance problems with your service it could be an issue at a local ISP or CDN you are using. It could be a more general problem in Berlin. It could be a lot of things. You can then use Dyn's information on where the problems actually are to direct your traffic through alternatives until the trouble passes. Obviously such problems occur all the time, some from mistakes, some from equipment failure, some from malicious action like a DDOS. In all cases, the first action to take is to route around the problem. Very often, existing services and practices use geolocation and hops as a proxy for latency in order to determine best route. But what if you actually had the latency numbers?

Quote for the day:

“Presence emerges when we feel personally powerful, which allows us to be acutely attuned...” -- Amy Cuddy

March 14, 2016

A Bulletproof DevOps Strategy to Ensure Success in the Cloud

First, you need to understand the solution patterns of the applications you’re looking to build. For instance, will there be data-intensive or processor-intensive applications, or a mix? Will the applications require any special hardware or software requirements, such as HPC or IPC middleware? Finally, consider security, performance, monitoring, governance — basically all of the core details that make up your requirements shopping list. Keep in mind that you’re not looking to solve the problem of a single application, but selecting a core cloud architecture that can accommodate most of the applications that will be built, tested, and deployed using your DevOps automation solution. Also, keep in mind that it’s okay to use multiple target clouds for deployment.

How InteraXon plans to monetize meditation–and more

The company’s headband is essentially a meditation coach. Muse works like an electroencephalogram (EEG), measuring the user’s brainwave activity and transmitting the data to an app. When your mind is at rest, the app plays audio of calm winds. When your mind begins to wander, the winds intensify to prompt you to refocus. At the end of a session, the Muse app tells you how well you performed and displays a graph of your brain’s activity. It’s a high-tech approach to an ancient practice, one that’s becoming more popular among busy professionals who recognize the benefits of meditation but don’t have time to attend a class

The top 12 cloud security threats

Many developers make the mistake of embedding credentials and cryptographic keys in source code and leaving them in public-facing repositories such as GitHub. Keys need to be appropriately protected, and a well-secured public key infrastructure is necessary, the CSA said. They also need to be rotated periodically to make it harder for attackers to use keys they’ve obtained without authorization. Organizations planning to federate identity with a cloud provider need to understand the security measures the provider uses to protect the identity platform. Centralizing identity into a single repository has its risks. Organizations need to weigh the trade-off of the convenience of centralizing identity against the risk of having that repository become an extremely high-value target for attackers.

Surprising tips from a super-hacker

Mitnick hacks as a kind of performance art in keynotes and talks at security conferences around the world. At CeBIT in Germany this year, for example, he performed several hacks including a demonstration showing how simply plugging in a thumb drive could give a hacker total control of your machine, including the ability to activate and monitor the camera and microphone or launch any program. In the hack, the USB thumbdrive tricks the laptop or PC into thinking it's a keyboard, rather than a storage device. That enables the hacker to inject keystrokes, which means he can do anything to your device that he could do by typing on your keyboard. Mitnick demonstrates this hack because "people think USBs are safe now, because they turn off 'auto-run.'" He wants the public to know that thumbdrives are not safe.

How to Reach a Competitive Advantage Through Huawei Open Source Solutions

Standards bodies continue to produce solid architectures and protocols. But they are slow and resist change. Traditional SDOs will remain relevant but must evolve. The MEF is a perfect example of doing it right. The MEF created a collaboration program, involving key industry standards development bodies, called MEF Unite. Instead of digging in its heels and resisting change, the MEF has put off its ego and begun collaborating with ... As providers (working with their vendors) customize the code, to make it unique to each company, they have created a competitive advantage. Vendors that offer customizable, and supported, solutions will succeed. Red Hat has proven the success of this model. Vendors and providers that quickly adapt to the open source world and learn to differentiate will have a future. Those that don’t will fail.

CIO and the Digital Dilemma

Gartner predicts that by 2018, controlled shadow IT will contribute up to 30 percent of IT operations activities, up from 15 percent in 2014. CIOs are recognizing that by investing and championing the introduction of new, digital services that are capable of accelerating growth while not undermining the effectiveness of pre-existing systems, IT will shift from being seen as strictly a cost center to becoming revered as the business’ competitive weapon. Thus a digital transformation is set to motion. With the likes of AirBNB, Amazon and Uber (to name a few), digital technologies are fueling economic growth at an exponential rate by establishing strong market positions and opening up new business models on which to capitalize. But that’s only the beginning.

Data Security Trends: Shifting perceptions on data security

Although the C-suite might be more involved in data security than in the past, IT teams feel executives still are not allocating the energy or resources needed to properly address data security challenges. ... there are concerns that senior executives don’t pay enough attention and aren’t well informed about data security issues and tools. The findings also show that 3 in 4 decision makers say their C-suite plans to increase current security measures, and more than half expect to spend more money on data security in the coming years. However, cost is a concern when it comes to building on existing security programs – 53 percent cite cost constraints for why they don’t anticipate adding additional security features in the future, and only 1 in 3 businesses are very confident in their C-suite’s ability to budget enough for data security solutions over the next five years.

4 best practices for implementing external business processes

For CIOs and IT managers, working out external business processes like EDI and collaborating on business process projects with hundreds of different business partners can be a daunting and frustrating undertaking. "We're in the process of assessing our external business process growth projections for the next three years," remarked one mid-sized company CIO. He was unsure as to which external business processes would be tackled first, but he made these points: He was concerned about the readiness of his staff to team with end business users and users from other companies for effective business process design or redesign to enable the externalization of business processes that were formerly internal. He was also worried about whether security and governance measures were sufficiently robust to support external information exchanges with other companies.

How to stay ahead of cyber criminals in the data breach era

A typical example of an irrelevant information scenario is the “former employee” situation. In this case, an attacker chooses to target a specific user from your list of employees, not knowing that the person no longer works for your organization. Because the employee no longer works for you, that employee should not be taking actions within the company’s network and the network shouldn’t be contacting them. Spotting this suspicious activity can help you prevent data breaches. Global law firm, Locke Lorde, was able to mitigate a cyber attack after catching a former employee using his credentials to access their network. The closer you track the use of irrelevant information, the quicker you can stop data breaches in their tracks.

Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence?

Since depth implies computational power and efficiency, we have focused on very deep neural nets from the start. For example, by the early 1990s, others were still limited to rather shallow nets with fewer than 10 subsequent computational stages, while our methods already enabled over 1,000 such stages. I'd say we were the ones who made neural nets really deep, especially recurrent networks, the deepest and most powerful nets of them all. Back then, few researchers were interested in this, but we kept going, and with cheaper and cheaper computing power, it was just a matter of time before contests would be won through such methods. I am glad to see that the other deep learning labs and companies are now also heavily using our algorithms.

Quote for the day:

"To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture." -- @jaysamit

March 13, 2016

IT's Shift From Service Provider to Business Partner

IT is a business enabler, providing secure and highly available technology solutions that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of TRS and our members. As such, it's my job to ensure IT is seen by our individual business areas as a true business partner, not just simply a service provider. IT needs to truly understand the business of TRS and be proactive in helping solve business problems and recommend innovations that move our business forward. ... The one thing that is certain in IT is it's going to change. Many times these technology changes have a significant impact on the rest of the business and/or provide an opportunity for improving efficiency. As such, the CIO often finds himself or herself in the position of change agent, promoting and leading enterprise projects that bring about significant shifts in the organization.

Amazon India planning to launch digital wallet

"Building own wallet helps it restrict access to customer data in the company's ecosystem and monetise customer insights," said another person familiar with Amazon India's plans. Amazon did not comment specifically on whether it plans to launch a digital wallet, only saying that it was "always exploring" acquisitions. "Payments are key to the e-commerce ecosystem," said Srinivas Rao, director at Amazon Payments India, in an emailed statement. "Developing a trusted, frictionless and ubiquitous payments ecosystem is critical to our customer-centric philosophy and we will invest in building the capabilities to drive our strategy." Currently, Amazon India uses its gift cards as pre-paid instruments for buying on its online marketplace, offering customers the option to top up these cards for up to Rs 10,000, which is the limit applicable to digital wallets under Indian regulations.

So You Think You Can Agile?

The interesting thing here is that everyone in the market—customers, communities, consultants, vendors and partners—wants the same outcome. Improving the way organisations work to ultimately enhance our way of life as a society: eliminating waste and responding to change quickly and confidently (well, at least that’s what my team and I want).So, one can only live hoping that’s why we're all here—to continue toward autonomy, mastery and purpose and in turn help enterprises do the same. We all want to embrace, educate and coach great outcomes for the people who work in these enterprises. Who doesn’t want to get up and be excited about the day of work ahead and help people improve their capabilities to ultimately create a better society?

Demand for security skills is ballooning: So can former hacker hotbed Romania help?

"Although companies are actively searching for security experts, many of these jobs aren't listed on the web," she says. HR professionals prefer to hire based on referrals. Many engineers are self-taught, building on top of the computer-science knowledge they acquired in school. Developer Gabriel Cirlig says cybersecurity was a hobby he had during high school. ... Cybrary co-founder Ryan Corey says Romanian users have a grasp of the basics but come to training providers to hone more advanced, niche security skills. "While US and UK users tend to take more beginner-level, general-interest courses such as Network+, CCNA and Linux+, Romanian users tend to take higher-level, more advanced security offerings like Malware Analysis and Advanced Penetration Testing," he says.

The Hidden Security Risks of Our IoT Devices

As IoT devices gather more and more data about us and our lives, we as consumers should be extremely concerned about these vulnerabilities. We may not think about it very much, but these IoT devices have collected a lot of information about our private lives. The refrigerator that orders your milk must have some sort of payment method set up with the grocer. Your thermostat knows when you are likely to be at home – and also when you are not. And your smart watch or wearable fitness tracker may have private information about your health and habits that you wouldn’t want anyone but your doctor to know. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report urging IoT manufacturers to put security first with these new technologies.

Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again?

Is it any wonder that the government is rebooting the crypto wars? For the first time, it’s really struggling with the results of the first war, as more information is now encrypted, increasingly in a manner the government finds really hard (or impossible) to decode. Apple has been impressively aggressive in its refusal to comply with that order, even though this test case involves possible information from a murderous terrorist. The company’s court filings outline with withering precision how complying with the government order — to essentially rewrite part of its operating system, an action it regards as an act of “compelled speech” — violates its rights and compromises the rights of its customers. With John Oliver-strength sarcasm, it refers to the software the FBI has ordered it to produce as “GovtOS.”

One API, Many Facades?

When developing an API that is going to be used by others, it’s important not to break that contract. Often, frameworks and tools allow you to generate an API definition from the codebase — for example, with an annotation-driven approach where you label your endpoints, query parameters, etc. with annotations. But sometimes, even if your own test cases still pass, the smallest code refactoring could very well break the contract. Your codebase might be fine, but the refactoring might have broken the code of your API consumers. To collaborate more effectively, consider going with an API-contract-first approach and make sure your implementation still conforms with the shared agreement: the API definition. There are different API definition languages available and popular these days, like Swagger, RAML, or API Blueprint. Pick one you’re comfortable with.

Big Data: Why You Must Consider Open Source

“There are multiple – and at this point in history, thoroughly validated – business benefits to using open source software.” Among those reasons, he says, are the lack of fees allowing customers to evaluate and test products and technologies at no expense, the enthusiasm of the global development community, the appeal of working in an open source environment to developers, and the freedom from “lock in”. This last one has one caveat, though, Kestelyn explains – “Be careful, though, of open source software that leaves you on an architectural island, with commercial support only available from a single vendor. This can make the principle moot.” The literal meaning of open source is that the raw source code behind the project is available for anyone to inspect, scrutinize and improve.

Web Application Firewall: a Must-Have Security Control or an Outdated Technology?

Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 60 percent of public web applications will be protected by a WAF. However, in 2015 Gartner had only one vendor listed in its WAF MQ as a Leader (Imperva), and only two vendors listed as Visionaries. All other vendors are either Niche Players or Challengers. Many more WAF vendors were simply not present in the MQ for not meeting the inclusion criteria. Last year, security researcher Mazin Ahmed published a White Paper to demonstrate that XSS protection from almost all popular WAF vendors can be bypassed. XSSPosed prior to announcing its private and open Bug Bounty programs, published new XSS vulnerabilities on the largest websites almost every day and was effectively an insightful resource for observing just how security researchers bypassed almost every WAF mentioned in the Magic Quadrant.

Data Is a Toxic Asset

Our Internet search data reveals what's important to us, including our hopes, fears, desires and secrets. Communications data reveals who our intimates are, and what we talk about with them. I could go on. Our reading habits, or purchasing data, or data from sensors as diverse as cameras and fitness trackers: All of it can be intimate. Saving it is dangerous because many people want it. Of course companies want it; that's why they collect it in the first place. But governments want it, too. In the United States, the National Security Agency and FBI use secret deals, coercion, threats and legal compulsion to get at the data. ... When a company with personal data goes bankrupt, it's one of the assets that gets sold. Saving it is dangerous because it's hard for companies to secure. For a lot of reasons, computer and network security is very difficult. Attackers have an inherent advantage over defenders, and a sufficiently skilled, funded and motivated attacker will always get in.

Quote for the day:

"Informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use." -- G. Moore

March 11, 2016

RSA 2016: Data compliance beyond the firewall

The feedback from RSA from security professionals was that you need to start with a data classification policy and you need to start considering how to isolate the data from where it resides. So, if you look at new solutions that allow you to manage your encryption keys around the data, regardless of where the data is structured – solutions such as Ionic, for instance – you’ll see that it’s a new way of looking at data storage and at the implications of where you store data. That said, to do it the right way you need not only technology, but you most likely need help from your in-house solicitor to make sure you fully master the legal ramifications of where your data [resides]. And that’s notwithstanding any requirements for e-discovery, where you may need to get access to data.

Is Breach Notification A Part Of Your Incident Response Plan?

Don’t notify too early. You’ll be criticized either way, so let the investigators help uncover as much information as they can about what happened to help you better communicate the facts. Consider issuing a hold statement in the meantime – something that states you’re aware of the issue. Define what constitutes a breach vs a security incident in your business partner and service provider contracts. This is important from a cyber insurance claims analysis perspective to help with breach notification costs. Cultivate relationships with local law enforcement, your local FBI and secret service gurus – before a breach event. Go above and beyond state attorney general expectations and be proactive with engaging with them during a breach event; you don’t want them to hear about the breach in the news before you tell them.

Got a new USB-C device? 19 accessories that will help

There's a new USB in town -- the Type-C port. Smaller than the familiar USB Type-A, the USB-C plug uses the latest USB 3.1 specification, which means it's not only faster but reversible, eliminating the frustration of trying to insert a USB plug upside-down. Able to carry up to 100 watts of power (six times the USB 3.0 limit), a USB-C port can deliver up to 10Gbps -- double that of current USB 3.0 devices. Although USB-C has been on its way for some time, there haven't been a lot of devices that use it -- until recently. Apple's 12-inch MacBook started the trend last year and was followed by other laptops , tablets and smartphones. And that's only the beginning. The problem: All those micro-USB and mini-USB hubs, cables, chargers and adapters that you've collected over the last several years can't plug into your new USB-C port.

What is bimodal IT and what does it mean for the CIO?

Put simply, bimodal IT involves running two separate modes of IT delivery within a business; one is a traditional, safe execution model, while the second is more exploratory, agile and fast. The approach is of particular interest to enterprises with legacy IT because it allows tried-and-true, existing systems to continue underpinning core business processes while newer, more agile delivery models work alongside them, without having to deal with the disruption of ripping everything up and starting again. But what could bimodal IT look like on a practical level? A useful analogy is thinking of bimodal IT as a swimming pool with two lanes: a fast lane for slower, more careful swimmers and another lane for faster, more agile swimmers.

Between SSL-cylla and Charib-TLS

The last 12 to 15 months has seen a significant upheaval in the threat landscape for securing Internet communications. In late 2014, security researchers at Google published the details of an attack they called POODLE (for Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption), which exploited a deficiency in one of the most common security protocols used on the Internet, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and allowed an attacker to determine the encryption key used in a supposedly secure connection and decrypt the data in transit. Despite the fact that this particular protocol was developed by Netscape in the 1990s and had been replaced by a better protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS), version 3 of the SSL protocol (SSLv3) remained in popular use for many years.

Global regulators shape the future of LTE-U, LAA

A hastily-assembled consortium, the LTE-U Forum (LTE-Unlicensed Forum), defined a set of loose rules explaining how LTE could work in 5GHz, with some modifications that they claimed would ensure co-existence with Wi-Fi. The goal of LTE-U was to get product to market quickly in the US, establishing working trials and networks without delay and meeting the commercial requirements of its proponents (selling and deploying new gear as soon as possible). Meanwhile, work started on the European regulators. The movers behind LTE-U lobbied the global cellular standards body, 3GPP, to develop standards that would satisfy ETSI. Since 3GPP-ETSI is a multi-year exercise, this was envisaged as a slower, parallel path to the LTE-U-FCC work.

The next big threat in hacking — data sabotage

"Criminal enterprises — they look for levers within society that are economically tuned to helping them make money," said IOActive's Miessler. "If you could tweak a credit score and get a better rate on money and you're making money by borrowing at better rates, these are things criminal enterprises look at — their ability to modify the system in some way to get an economic return." Manipulating credit scores or bank account numbers is a natural evolution from yesterday's big data breaches, where the personal information on millions of U.S. shoppers, health-care patients and government workers could already be in use for such manipulation schemes. "That's the interesting thing about integrity attacks — they can be highly beneficial to the attacker in that they can often achieve their goals more effectively than a traditional attack," said Steve Grobman

Europe’s CIOs examine impact of new data protection regulation

CIOs must help their businesses to recognise the importance of sanctions emanating from the GDPR. The regulation presents a new challenge, but the current situation regarding data protection is far from ideal, says Jacobs. A company operating across Europe might have to deal with as many as 28 different data privacy regimes. CIOs should see the GDPR as an opportunity, she says. Rather than data protection being a complex puzzle, the regulation should help to provide legal consistency across Europe. “The principle of creating a single regulation across many countries is a good idea,” she says. “But there have been many lobbies around the detail of the regulation and the exact text will not be known until later this year.”

Bitcoin Technology Will Long Outlive Digital Currency

"Bitcoin, if it became broadly accepted, would challenge states’ dominance of the economy. It is designed to prevent monopoly by states or other entities, building a new currency based on shared information and making it hard for any entity to gain control. Politics disappears and a combination of technology and cryptographic proofs is conjured up in its place," he wrote. "Unfortunately, the magic is wearing off. Some of the technological innovations associated with bitcoin will stick around. The political project will not. Rather than overcoming conventional politics, bitcoin is succumbing to it," he wrote. The problem is centered around bitcoin's blockchain, which is a public, decentralized ledger that records every single bitcoin transaction.

The Next Big Thing In Big Data: BDaaS

As well as the “firehose” of tweets it provides analytics tools and applications for making sense of that messy, unstructured data and has trained 4,000 consultants to help businesses put plans into action to profit from them. Another is agricultural manufacturers John Deere, which fits all of its tractors with sensors that stream data about the machinery as well as soil and crop conditions to the MyJohnDeere.com and Farmsight services. Farmers can subscribe to access analytical intelligence on everything from when to order spare parts to where to plant crops. The arrival of Apple’s Watch – perhaps the device that will bring consumer wearables into the mainstream – will doubtlessly bring with it a tsunami of new BDaaS apps.

Quote for the day:

"People will work for a living but they'll die for recognition." -- Lee Odden

March 10, 2016

Designing a modern enterprise architecture

The reason enterprise architectures must change is the confluence of high-speed connectivity and decades of exponential Moore's Law improvements in computing power. This has enabled cheap smartphones to saturate the market and utility-scale IT service providers to create cloud services. Together, these technologies have catalyzed dramatic changes in business. Whether you call it the New Economics of Connections (Gartner) or the Unbounded Enterprise (AT&T Bell Labs), it means businesses, and consequently IT systems and applications, will increasingly interact not just with people, but devices, virtual objects, and other software in the form of automated business processes and intelligent devices.

Biggest-Ever Blockchain Trial is Only the Beginning

Grant described the trial in similarly ambitious terms, indicating that it sent four technology providers specifications for the test – Chain, IBM, Intel and Eris (which delivered versions of the concept on its platform and Ethereum) – that included design specs for three specific trading scenarios. "We had [banks] issuing, trading and redeeming commercial paper, and we had every one of those banks do that in the platform," Grant said. He explained that all banks were encouraged to transact with at least one other bank over the course of the trial, with Grant suggesting that "at least 60 trades" were completed in the simulations. No real funds were exchanged as part of the test. Grant suggested that two of R3’s partners declined to participate due to what he called a "significant resource requirement".

Is DevOps good or bad for security?

Miller views that as one of the benefits of DevOps. “Because CD emphasizes having a code review process, small check-ins and rapid mitigation come with it. If you can deploy four or five times a day, you can mitigate something within hours.” The same applies to spotting breaches, says Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft’s developer tools team. “With DevOps, you're worried about things like mean time to detect, mean time to remediate, how quickly can I find indicators of compromise. If something anomalous happens on a configuration, you have telemetry that helps you detect, and you keep improving your telemetry – so you get better detection, you get better at spotting indicators of compromise and you get better at remediation.” Continuous deployment makes life harder for attackers in two ways, Guckenheimer explains.

Context is king: Aruba founder talks about future of wireless

Speaking about upcoming wireless standards, Melkote said that 802.11ad would rise to prominence within the next two years. The 60GHz technology doesn’t propagate over great distances or through thick barriers, but offers the possibility of very high throughput. “Initially, it was envisioned as a high-speed replacement for cable,” he said. “If you’re trying for coverage, it’s not the right technology, but if you’re trying to provide capacity, it can be a good technology.” But he cautioned that it is still very early in the game where 802.11ad is concerned, and that there aren’t even chipsets yet available. “The big thing that I look for here is the economics – can you get to a price point that is palatable for the end user?” Melkote said.

The Data Science Puzzle, Explained

While one may not agree entirely (or even minimally) with my opinion on much of this terminology, there may still be something one can get out of this. Several concepts central to data science will be examined. Or, at least, central in my opinion. I will do my best to put forth how they relate to one another and how they fit together as individual pieces of a larger puzzle. As an example of somewhat divergent opinions, and prior to considering any of the concepts individually, KDnuggets' Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro has put together the following Venn diagram which outlines the relationship between the very same data science terminology we will be considering herein. The reader is encouraged to compare this Venn diagram with Drew Conway's now famous data science Venn diagram, as well as my own discussion below and modified process/relationship diagram near the bottom of the post.

The Benefits of Hiring Freelance Big Data Experts

One of the major benefits gained from going the freelance route is flexibility. Instead of hiring a full time data scientist to oversee all big data projects within an organization, the company instead hires on a per project basis. This is especially important for smaller businesses, since the time between big data projects at that level can often be lengthy. Passing over the full time option means a business wouldn’t have to worry about paying a big data expert when they have nothing for them to do. Hiring based on the project means a smarter use of limited resources. This added flexibility also leads to choosing data experts based off of their individual talents. For example, if a big data project requires hiring a data scientist with expertise in sales, the small business can do so. Their fees aren’t based off of a salary but rather on the milestones reached in the project.

Digital Hijackers – the rising threat of ransomware

Ransomware is a cyber version of kidnapping, with the same motives: money. It works like a virus that secretly encrypts files. Victims don’t get the key until paying the ransom. It’s as if instead of a thief stealing your car, they took the car keys and put them in a safe left in your garage. You don’t get the combination to the safe, and use of your car unless you pay up. ... As the attacks have gotten more advanced and correspondingly expensive to develop, they have also become more costly, with an average ransom of about $300 per infected host. What is an extortionate annoyance to someone trying to get their family photo library back can be a significant business expense, both in the ransom itself and the indirect costs of operational disruption and cleanup, when faced with a data center full of affected systems.

Defining 'reachability' on the global Internet

Each geographic market has Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that connect customers to the Internet, and those local ISPs connect to larger ISPs that ultimately connect to geographies all over the world. Your website sits in data centers or in the cloud with its own Internet connectivity. This combined connection path between your website and these ISPs is how you get to different markets. These days, every business is Internet based, which means your customer can come from any market. Even a North American-focused company is still concerned about dozens of important markets. Global companies can be connecting to customers in up to 800 markets. Knowing how well your web assets can reach a market allows you to plan business expansion, plan cloud, CDN and hosting investments, and tune your application and performance metrics by market.

VMware Virtual SAN: The Technology And Its Future

The economics of storage are skewed in favor of all-flash for an increasing number of use cases. For me, our experience with the Virtual SAN cluster deployed as part of the Hands-On Lab (HOL) infrastructure in VMworld 2014 was an eye opener. The storage workload generated by 100s of concurrent, constantly churning Labs is not very cache friendly (no surprise here). As such, the VMware IT team used a large number of spindles for the capacity tier of Virtual SAN to deal with the workload “escaping” the cache. In other words, the spindles were needed for performance, not capacity. We realized that an all-flash hardware would require fewer capacity devices and it would cost less! And that was already the case back in 2014. The main challenge with the high-capacity, low cost SSDs is their low endurance (typically below 1 device-write per day guaranteed for 5 years).

What is IT Service Brokering? Find out in this recent paper

In a very simple and easy-to-understand way, Moore explains the differences between cloud service brokering and service brokering, and why brokerage in IT is needed. He analyzes what makes up a service broker and what parts are IT’s responsibility, such as APIs, micro-services and application services. Moore discusses where to start to become a service broker as well as some initial challenges that IT needs to overcome. Service broker is a new operating model for IT and multiple steps, some substantial and time consuming, are needed. Moore talks about navigating this transition throughout the automation, orchestration and transformation phases. Digital disruption is real, and for IT, among many other aspects, it brings a new type of integration delivery.

Quote for the day:

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure." -- Paulo Coelho

March 09, 2016

How to avoid collaboration overload

How your business take advantage of collaboration without pushing your most valuable employees straight into a burn-and-churn cycle? The answer is data, says Duggan. Being able to track projects, collaborative efforts and interpersonal dependencies is key to making sure no one is taking on too much, and that workloads are distributed evenly so that bottlenecks don't occur, he says. Duggan says that the number-1 barrier to operational efficiency is accurate tracking of interdepartmental dependencies. In the past, CIOs and managers would direct their teams to focus solely on their own projects and the result was a very siloed organization; over the past decade collaboration has become the norm and so the emphasis must change to understand the rewards versus the risks in that new mindset, Duggan says.

5 Chrome extensions that reduce distraction while you work

Time online is more likely to kill productivity than enhance it. Think of all the work hours you’ve wasted scrolling through your Facebook feed or going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. But with the right Chrome extensions, you can minimize these distractions and actually increase your productivity. ... If you don’t like the reports you’re getting from TimeStats, you need this extension. Rather than blocking websites outright, StayFocusd lets you allot the amount of time you can spend on your favorite distractions. But once you reach that limit, the site is blocked for the rest of the day. StayFocusd is very configurable. In addition to blocking entire sites, it lets you control access to specific subdomains, paths, pages, and content

Cyber security tools tend to pile up. Here’s how to rationalize them

Companies often begin the security rationalization process after accumulating a portfolio of tools over the years (i.e. penetration testers, web-application, and code scanners) or through mergers and acquisitions or shifting business strategies. If your organization has typically purchased every tool, the practice is a great way to spot redundancies. For those who have postponed major purchases, the rationalization process will highlight gaps or where too little attention has been paid and there may be vulnerabilities. Put simply, the best rationalization projects enhance new and more customer-centric ways of delivering services by seamlessly integrating IT into business processes - even as demand grows exponentially.

These technologies will blow the lid off data storage

"Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk. Meanwhile, Seagate has demonstrated its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for HDDs, which will enable data densities of more than 10 trillion (10Tbits) per square inch. That's 10 times higher than the areal density in today's highest density HDDs. Seagate expects to work with equipment makers in 2017 to demonstrate HAMR products for data center applications, and in 2018 the company expects to begin shipping HAMR drives to broader markets. These recent technology advances are just the latest chapter in the long story of ever-growing storage needs forcing innovations to meet the new demand.

15 Data Security Policies Ignored by Modern Workers

IT isn’t the only department stretched thin. In the past 20 years the economy has grown nearly 60 percent. Corporate profits have increased 20 percent. And wages have stagnated for most Americans. The workday goes from 9 to 7 and the U.S. is among a small club of nations that doesn’t require time off. See the trend? Despite data security policies, everybody is working fast and hard in a dangerous, connected world. At this breakneck speed, IT policies—designed to educate employees and manage risk—are white noise for the modern worker. Clearly, both parties in this relationship have to change—and clearly, that change won’t be easy. In the meantime, IT can buoy data policies with smart technology that does what employees won’t—like continuously back up laptops to ensure business continuity in the face of anything.

Is this the future of the Internet of Things?

Ambient intelligence could transform cities through dynamic routing and signage for both drivers and pedestrians. It could manage mass transit for optimal efficiency based on real-time conditions. It could monitor environmental conditions and mitigate potential hotspots proactively, predict the need for government services and make sure those services are delivered efficiently, spot opportunities to streamline the supply chain and put them into effect automatically. Nanotechnology in your clothing could send environmental data to your smart phone, or charge it from electricity generated as you walk. But why carry a phone when any glass surface, from your bathroom mirror to your kitchen window, could become an interactive interface for checking your calendar, answering email, watching videos, and anything else we do today on our phones and tablets?

The organisation that runs the internet address book is about to declare independence

Barring any last-minute hiccups, though, something remarkable will happen at the meeting. After two years of negotiations, ICANN is set to agree on a reform that would turn it into a new kind of international organisation. If this goes ahead, a crucial global resource, the internet’s address system, will soon be managed by a body that is largely independent of national governments. And some of ICANN’s champions reckon this is just a start. In future, similar outfits could be tasked with handling other internet issues that perplex governments, such as cyber-security and invasions of privacy. The beauty of the internet is its openness. As long as people stick to its technical standards, anybody can add a new branch or service.

Applying the Scientific Method in Data Center Management

Recently, scientists at the State University of New York at Binghamton created a calibrated model of a 41-rack data center to test how accurately one type of software (6SigmaDC) could predict temperatures in that facility and to create a test bed for future experiments. The scientists can configure the data center easily, without fear of disrupting mission critical operations, because the setup is solely for testing. They can also run different workloads to see how those might affect energy use or reliability in the facility. Most enterprise data centers don’t have such flexibility, but they can cordon off sections of their facility as a test bed, as long as they have sufficient scale. For most enterprises, such direct experimentation is impractical. What almost all of them can do is create a calibrated model of their facility and run the experiments in software.

IoT in education: Gonzaga taps ITSM to manage device growth

"The reality of IoT is creeping into organizations ... but it is showing up to college campuses in force," Coppins said. Other EasyVista higher education customers include Fordham University, Samford University, the University of Barcelona and Villanova University.Schools are indeed taking notice of IoT in education, judging from the IoT-focused conference tracks at recent higher education gatherings. In November 2015, the semiannual meeting of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, for example, featured an IoT session. The session's introduction asked, "What do we do when our students arrive on our campuses in Internet-enabled vehicles, wearing Internet-enabled clothing, carrying eight to 10 Internet-enabled devices and with clear expectations that our systems can support them?"

How will blockchain technology transform financial services?

Evangelists say the possibilities are limitless. Applications range from storing client identities to handling cross-border payments, clearing and settling bond or equity trades to smart contracts that are self-executing, such as a credit derivative that pays out automatically if a company goes bust or a bond that regularly pays interest to the holder. Some go as far as to suggest that the technology even offers the potential to disrupt companies that have forged reputations as “disrupters”, such as Uber and Airbnb. At its core, blockchain is a network of computers, all of which must approve a transaction has taken place before it is recorded, in a “chain” of computer code. As with bitcoin — the first application of the technology, applied to money — cryptography is used to keep transactions secure and costs are shared among those in the network.

Quote for the day:

"Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom." -- Clifford Stoll

March 08, 2016

Use a BPM strategy to modernize legacy applications

As is nearly always the case, enterprise architecture may provide an easy path if an "EA model" is available. It would be fair to say that for a major enterprise to modernize legacy applications on a large scale, it should never proceed without first developing an EA model according to one of the established standards such as TOGAF. Where the scope of application modernization projects is more limited, it's possible to recover business process definitions from current applications. Where you have no EA framework for direct BPM mapping, take application workflows and "abstract" them by grouping application features into the business processes they support.

The Other Side of Agile: Ceremonial Development

As you can see, ironically, the Agile Manifesto is very simple. Good Agile practices are much more in the spirit of Kaizen and continuous improvement, as opposed to the sterile doctor prescription of do’s and don’ts that most people associate with Agile. And when I come to realize it, the most successful teams that I’ve worked with have excelled exactly at this — responding and adapting to change. These teams were great at what they did because they had mechanisms in place for the team to continuously improve its own delivery. Truth be told, they weren’talways great because of their code reviews. Or pair-programming. Or Stand-up meetings. Or user stories. These things were sometimes very important in the delivery, but once something becomes routine, it can be hard to take a step back and evaluate if it is still delivering on its value proposition.

Seagate Reveals World's Fastest SSD

Seagate's new SSD is based on the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface, which was developed by a cooperative of more than 80 companies and released in March 2011. The NVMe specification defined an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for SSDs using the PCIe interface -- a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard used in both enterprise and client systems. Intel's SSD 750 series drive, which also uses the NVMe/PCIe interface. The SSD sports read speeds of up to 2,500MB per second or 2.5GB per second. "The unit could be used in an all-flash array or as an accelerated flash tier with hard-disk drives (HDDs) for a more cost-effective hybrid storage alternative," Seagate stated in a news release about the new SSD.

Interview: Laura Galante, FireEye

“How are we not able to solve this problem? Because we don’t have visibility into it? The suspicion is the data is probably sitting there in the private sector because everyone is feeling this too. The perfect marriage was Mandiant sitting there with all of this investigation data and thinking, what if there is something huge here and IP is going out the door? We didn’t know how to think about it, and Mandiant needed intelligence so they hired a few of us out of government to figure out what the data was, how to model and analyse it and that is just what we did.” Galante worked on the APT1 report that was released in February 2013, and this allowed her to see network data on the host side and not just on the network, and understand what malware is sitting there that sends out these alerts.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Indian IT Firms

It is not uncommon for women to face unconscious biasness at work, which may impact them negatively and make them feel out of place in a male largely male dominated industry like technology. For instance, unconscious bias can happen when male team members put in long working hours for a project while the female workers may leave the office at fixed times. This can be misconstrued as the male workers contributing more to the project, whereas in reality, both male and female employees could be contributing the same, or the latter even more for that matter. Organizations are now actively working towards mitigating gender bias and bring in more transparency that would make women feel more inclusive.

Bimodal IT strategy opens up opportunities for innovation

Today's application lifecycle is measured in weeks, not years, meaning neither customers nor employees have the patience for a lengthy software development process. Organizations that are too slow to capitalize on an emerging digital business opportunity lose out to competitors that move quickly. But such a quick process requires using Agile development practices, fostering close cooperation between developers and IT operations, heavily instrumenting applications to measure performance, feature usage and errors, and employing continuous delivery processes that facilitate a steady stream of bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Scrum is Just a Starting Point | The Clever PM

There is certainly value to be had in looking to prescriptive definitions like those found in the Scrum Guide — they provide us all with a common understanding of the component parts of what that particular publisher or consultancy has defined as “Scrum”. It enables us to have intelligent conversations using such jargon words as Product Manager, Scrum Master, Stand Up, Retrospective, and other terms that have only contextual meaning within the world of Scrum. It also provides those who need guidance and assistance in establishing the foundation for Agile practices with some clearly-defined, specifically-actionable, and proven steps to take and ceremonies to implement to achieve their goals.

DHL Asia-Pacific Innovation Centre incubates future logistics technology

“The innovation agenda is not a new one for DHL,” said Mei Pang, vice-president, innovation, solution delivery and service management at DHL customer solutions and innovation in Asia-Pacific. “From an operational point of view, DHL has always known to come out with new things. In 2007, our corporate office in Germany made a decision to invest in a central team to focus on innovation to look at the future of logistics and identify major trends,” Pang told Computer Weekly. “Part of the initiative was to open a conversation with partners, and the approach we take is a very collaborative one where we work with suppliers, customers and academics to focus on the use cases and try to make them practically applicable in our business,” she added. “That concept worked very well in Germany.”

Intel's Pentium Bug Fix Is Proposed as Solution for Dark Pools

The pitch comes as banks have been beset by fines. UBS was fined $14.4 million by the SEC for problems at its private stock-trading platform. Barclays Plc and Credit Suisse Group AG racked up more than $154 million to settle allegations that they misled investors about how their dark pools were managed. Investment Technology Group Inc. agreed to pay $20.3 million for its infractions. Aesthetic Integration was founded by Denis Ignatovich, formerly head of the central risk trading desk at Deutsche Bank AG in London, and Grant Passmore, a mathematician and expert on formal verification. Passmore said formal verification uses algorithms to analyze other algorithms. Rather than endlessly trying to test possible outcomes, machine reasoning acts like an automated mathematician, creating proofs and theorems to speed up the work.

Testers in TDD teams

The big QA of the Nineties seems history. Many IT organizations have dissolved their QA departments and have spread their testers over Agile teams. However, in many of those teams, the testers are still doing the same manual testing they did in the nineties. Many organizations are therefore still stuck with the same dysfunctional testing they had twenty years ago. The dysfunctionality of Old school QA lies in its excessive use of functional testers. These are professionals specialized in manual testing, but having few technical skills. Their specialization makes functional testers good in 'testing' functionality. However, old school QA has a tendency (and often a commercial interest) to also use these testers to 'check' functionality.

Quote for the day:

"Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor." -- Brian Tracy