Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

November 27, 2013

Five Benefits to Becoming a Data-Driven CFO
In a data-driven business culture, the CFO will have the ability to align operational goals with management’s strategic agenda by utilizing predictive models based on historical data as a highly focused planning tool. Using data to drive decisions that impact present and future operations, CFOs cement their role in helping the business achieve cost savings and uncover new revenue opportunities. Understanding the correlations between financial data and operational data allows the CFO to maximize operating capital and cash flow; to anticipate areas or periods of slow-down and proactively manage company assets.

Putting Spark to Use: Fast In-Memory Computing for Your Big Data Applications
Spark’s ease-of-use comes from its general programming model, which does not constrain users to structure their applications into a bunch of map and reduce operations. Spark’s parallel programs look very much like sequential programs, which make them easier to develop and reason about. Finally, Spark allows users to easily combine batch, interactive, and streaming jobs in the same application. As a result, a Spark job can be up to 100x faster and requires writing 2-10x less code than an equivalent Hadoop job.

Take your app on the road, put it in a car
With all that said, the idea of extending existing apps into cars is a good one, and it would be nice if there were a common platform to allow app developers a single target to aim at. To that end, earlier this year, Ford open sourced AppLink to the GENIVI Alliance, which is a consortium of auto manufacturers and technology vendors looking to produce a Linux-based in-car infotainment system. But given the slow pace with which the auto industry moves compared to the technology industry, I wouldn't be expecting any Earth-shattering announcements anytime soon.

Facilitating Enterprise Cloud Adoption through Intelligent Policy Enforcement
What intelligent policy enforcement does for an organization is ensure that their security and compliance standards are adhered to at all times while also improving the work habits of users. As these policies evolve and grow over time, organizational efficiency rises with them, as users become more comfortable using the platform and its security requirements. Better access to the collaborative tools offered by the cloud translate into more productive employees, and over time the work environment itself becomes more flexible and responsive.

6 Ways Cloud Services Brokerage Makes IT-as-a-Service a Reality
More than 70% of IT executives want ITaaS, according to a 2012 IDG survey. However, they are held back from reaching this goal because they do not have sufficient tools and processes in place. Enter the Cloud Services Brokerage ... CSB gives back control to IT in six important ways, including centralized management and governance, centralized services procurement, interoperability among disparate services, data security, cost containment, and strategic planning through analytics and modeling.

E-book: IAM for the Real World: Simplifying Complexity
The historical approach to IAM involves piecing together “half solutions,” in hope that tomorrow’s solutions will address real-world needs. The e-book “IAM for the Real World: Simplifying Complexity” evaluates what IAM for the real world would, should and can look like. It delves into the most pressing IAM issues faced by virtually every organization and offers actionable, affordable and sustainable approaches to the IAM challenges you face. At Dell Software, we help you achieve your IAM objectives for your real world (not ours), in a way that moves you and your business towards your goals.

When it comes to storage, cache is king
If you like deep-diving into tech, and you’re interested in how flash is changing computing architecture, then you should read that paper. It deals with a whole stack of stuff that most people are just coming to terms with today, including whether flash memory should be thought of as a special part of main memory or as a special part of persistent storage. It also has some interesting perspectives on drive wear-out, and makes the case that an SSD will absorb more writes than a disk over its typical lifecycle.

The GRC maturity model and value proposition
To meet these ever-evolving and expanding needs, top-performing organizations have begun to combine Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) into an integrated set of standards, policies, guidelines, and procedures and tools that are in many respects similar to how we have historically integrated the disciplines of finance and accounting, or marketing and communications, or programming and testing.

Here's the one problem with wearables that we all need to fix
The only frustration with the Pebble is that I keep forgetting to charge it. But at least I actually strap it onto me. Not so much with the Fitbit, which just has to live in one of my pockets. It's so small and light that it's easy to lose. If my keys fell out of my pocket, I'd notice that. If my Fitbit did -- no chance. Case in point, it might be the case that you sit down in McDonalds with a Fitbit, smartphone, keys, and wallet, and then you get home you discover that you no longer have a Fitbit.

All You Need To Know About Botnets
Botnets are exploited for various purposes,including denial-of-service attacks, creation or misuse of SMTP mail relays for spam (see Spambot), click fraud, mining bitcoins, spamdexing, and the theft of application serial numbers, login IDs, and financial informationsuch as credit card numbers. The botnet controller community features a constant and continuous struggle over who has the most bots, the highest overall bandwidth, and the most “high-quality” infected machines, like university, corporate, and even government machines.

Quote for the day:

"Success...My nomination for the single most important ingredient is energy well directed."- Louis Lundborg

November 26, 2013

Simplifying Asynchronous Code With Scala Async
Ever wished the compiler could make asynchronous programming easier? Enter Scala Async. Do asynchronous I/O like "normal" blocking I/O, program with Futures and Promises even more naturally! Scala Async makes it possible to "suspend" at arbitrary points in a block of regular Scala code, and to "resume" from that point later--all without blocking.

Former VMware CIO talks top data threats
As the former CIO of Symantec Corp. and VMware Inc., Mark Egan has seen his share of data threats and how quickly these threats morph. Take cloud and virtualization, two areas CIOs dubbed cringe-worthy in terms of security a few years ago. No more, given the maturity of the vendors' own security controls -- albeit because of customer demand for better data security and privacy, he explained.

Open router project launched to improve network privacy
The fact that it's running open-source software on an open hardware design adds trust, with fewer ways for the device to be compromised. But it does mean that another variant of Tor is being created, and another distribution of the Linux operating system — albeit a minor one. While code updates can and perhaps should be automated, it does represent another place where things have the potential to go wrong. Bugs love the crevices between modules.

Q-and-A with Bill Swanson, global CFO and North America CEO, Cartridge World
CEOs are thought of as visionaries. They are paid to think big and seek innovation, constantly looking for ways to drive business, improve perception of the brand and develop new revenue streams. In contrast, a CFO is more engaged in the current realities of the business and must counterbalance these often grandiose ideas with a more cautious fiscal outlook. That balance is important, and we simply couldn’t afford to lose it at Cartridge World.

What the smartwatch says about our mobile ecosystem
A smartwatch is not a stand-alone device. It generally coexists smartphones and tablets and is dependent upon that connection for true mobile productivity to take effect. As Jeff Kagan with CNN put it: “The smartwatch will be your remote control for your smart phone. And your smart phone will be your remote control for your life.”

A CIO Survival Guide to Saying No

Developing the art of polite refusal--especially when declining a request from a fellow business executive--is a CIO leadership skill of the highest order. It speaks to your personal reputation for inspiring trust, building relationships and communicating honestly. "Veteran CIOs find that by using tools such as skillful conversation, deep governance and sense-and-respond intelligence, denial doesn't have to kill a career," Kim S. Nash writes.

Forrester to security leaders: Embrace continuous improvement
Security leaders can choose from a slew of CI programs out there designed to improve the quality of products and services or efficiency of processes, such as Six Sigma, kaizen and kieffer. CI initiatives for data security and privacy can help drive deep process, cultural and behavioral change within the organization by: 1) establishing key processes to embed security and privacy mindfulness; 2) creating a culture of importance and respect for data security and privacy; and 3) empowering security teams to stop data exfiltration.

10 things we learned - or didn't -- from Cisco's Insieme launch
Cisco's introduction of the Insieme Networks product line and strategy was the most anticipated networking announcement in almost two years. It represents Cisco's response to the software-defined networking trend pervading the industry, and threatening Cisco's dominance and profits. While not a watershed moment – Insieme didn't change Cisco's modus operandii, as explained below -- Insieme is nonetheless one of the most important events and product introductions in Cisco's history.

Contrasting Backbone and Angular
In this article the author goes down the list of the things we have to deal with day to day when building web applications, and show how Backbone and Angular can help with each of them. ... Most of the things we do as web developers fall into one of the following categories: Implementing business logic; Constructing the DOM; Implementing view logic (declarative and imperative); Syncing up the model and view; Managing complex UI interactions; Managing state and routing and Creating and wiring up components

BYOD Programs: A 10-Point Checklist for a Successful Strategy
BYOD is an approach that allows employees, business partners and others to use personally selected and purchased client devices to execute enterprise applications and access data. It typically spans smartphones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs, including netbooks, notebooks or other portable connected devices. "BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades," said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Quote for the day:

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” -- Warren G. Bennis

November 25, 2013

Twitter tightens security against NSA snooping
The company implemented "perfect forward secrecy" on its Web and mobile platforms, it said Friday. The technology should make it impossible for an organization to eavesdrop on encrypted traffic today and decrypt it at some point in the future. At present, the encryption between a user and the server is based around a secret key held on the server. The data exchange cannot be read but it can be recorded in its encrypted form. Because of the way the encryption works, it's possible to decrypt the data at some point in the future should the server's secret key ever be obtained.

Most significant mobile tech of 2013: Windows 8.1
While updates are the natural order of things in the OS world, make no mistake, Windows 8.1 was largely created to address those things people didn't like about the first release. It was intended to make the OS work better on tablets, as mobile is very important to both Windows and Microsoft. In that effort Microsoft succeeded, as Windows 8.1 has turned the platform into a good one for tablets. It does so while also becoming a good engine for notebooks, the other side of the mobile coin.

16 products that Microsoft has killed off
Every product has its end. It is either replaced, upgraded or merged in with something else. Even Microsoft, a company that is notoriously generous and patient with letting a product gain momentum, is willing to pull the plug when necessary. Here are some of the most notable Microsoft products that have met their demise.

Top 10 Unstructured Data Projects for 2014
Everyone’s talking about unstructured data lately – the cost, the risk, the massive growth – but little is being done to control it. Analyst group IDC estimates unstructured data growth at 40-60 percent per year, a statistic that is not only startling, but puts a great deal of emphasis on the need to start managing it today or at least have it on the schedule for 2014. With budgets tightening – often to pay for storage costs – data center managers are struggling to find the highest impact projects that will see an immediate ROI.

Researchers use shopping cart to put mobile, NFC payment theft on wheels
Despite widespread adoption in Europe and the UK, the researchers found that contactless payments are more vulnerable then previously believed. Hacking into NFC payment transmission and covertly skimming, relaying or eavesdropping on the transmission of sensitive customer information isn't new; researchers began to make these three types of vulnerabilities public around 2008. Yet making it easy and reliable was not a known quantity until now - four security researchers from the University of Surrey have examined success rates, distance and more, using cheap store-bought electronics.

Berlin court rules Google privacy policy violates data protection law
Google said it would appeal the decision. "We believe our Terms of Service and privacy policy comply with all applicable laws, a Google spokesman said in an emailed statement. If the verdict is upheld, it could have far-reaching implications for Google. "When it is final Google will have to change a lot, change its privacy policy and terms and conditions," Skutnik said. But the federation will have to be patient: "If we're lucky" the court of appeal will make a decision by the end of next year, she said.

What Is a Leadership Pipeline?
How do we make it safe for people at all levels of your organization to practice leadership? Leadership has become a buzz word these days and I want to make it clear that my opinion is that we not only want to practice leadership, we want to practice followership. In order to create a great leadership pipeline in your business you have to practice what it is to lead and what it is to follow and we have to make it safe in our companies to build a culture of being able to say what’s on our mind without repercussion.

Backend as a Service: Reap the benefits, master the challenges
Most mobile applications also require resources on the other side of the network: a place to store data, means for managing users, support for push notifications and things like leveraging geolocation services. In fact, building a fully featured mobile app often depends on the ability to support these back-end capabilities. In response to that need, a new class of Platform as a Service [PaaS] has emerged that many in the market referred to as Backend as a Service because these offerings provide the required back-end capabilities in a cloud-hosted model.

California sues SAP over failed payroll software project
"After three years, and paying SAP approximately $50 million to integrate its own software into a new payroll and benefits system for the state of California, all the [state controller's office] has to show for its investment is a system that could not get the payroll right even once over an eight-month period for a pilot group of only 1,500 employees," the lawsuit states. The suit, filed Thursday in Sacramento County District Court, comes after a lengthy back-and-forth between the state and SAP over the system, which was supposed to serve 240,000 workers and replace 30-year-old legacy systems.

Avoiding the Minefields to Ignite MDM Value
While the concept of MDM is not new, it’s a rapidly evolving marketplace that has become crowded with applications and a blur of sameness when it comes to marketing messages and positioning. When evaluating MDM vendors, organizations should conduct due diligence and take time to verify that that the vendor under consideration has a team of seasoned experts who can turn data into revenue. Start by asking questions such as what is the average tenure of your employees, and what is the earliest deployment your customers have experienced starting from the beginning of the project?

Quote for the day:

"Worry, like a rocking chair, will give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere." -- Vance Havner

November 24, 2013

Add red flags to risk-based access weights in IBM Security Access ManagerMany organizations prefer a red-flag approach to risk assessment. In this approach, certain variable values in a transaction are defined as "red flags," and if any of those variable values appear, the transaction is considered risky. ... To implement red-flag risk assessment, give every red-flag variable a weight of one, and every other variable a weight of zero. Set the risk threshold level to 1%. If any of the red-flag variables are risky, the risk level will be above 0%, and, therefore, it will be considered dangerous and treated accordingly.

Analytics 3.0: Evolution
Some of us now perceive another shift, fundamental and far-reaching enough that we can fairly call it Analytics 3.0. Briefly, it is a new resolve to apply powerful data-gathering and analysis methods not just to a company’s operations but also to its offerings—to embed data smartness into the products and services customers buy. ... the first companies to perceive the general direction of change—those with a sneak peek at Analytics 3.0—will be best positioned to drive that change

Supercomputing's big problem: What's after silicon?
Supercomputing researchers aren't sure what's next. Today, supercomputing relies on architectural changes, such as adding speedy GPUs, to boost performance. Researchers may increasingly turn to chips that integrate interconnects and memory to speed processing and reduce energy. But the teams must also wrestle with the enormous costs of building -- and running -- multi-petaflop systems. "We have reached the end of the technological era," said William Gropp, chairman of the SC13 conference and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

IBM's Strategy and Direction: Analyst View
IBM is very aware of market transformation being caused by Cloud, and continues to move toward an increasingly unified, standards-based Cloud IT and business environment. These moves will serve their established partner and customer base well, and can protect IBM from significant loss in those areas. But as Cloud-native competitors continue to establish and grow their own partner/customer bases of influence, Big Blue needs to continue to consolidate, coordinate, and accelerate a Cloud-first mentality across its divisions.

Engineers Plan a Fully Encrypted Internet
The IETF change would introduce encryption by default for all Internet traffic. And the work to make this happen in the next generation of HTTP, called HTTP 2.0, is proceeding “very frantically,” says Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College in Dublin who is part of the project. The hope is that a specification will be ready by the end of 2014. It would then be up to websites to actually adopt the technology, which is not mandatory.

Pattern Based Requirements Model Using SysML
When we start decomposing these problems, we realize that they consist of sub-problems of similar type such as accepting input from a librarian is similar to accepting operational commands from a pilot or displaying book query result on a display is similar to displaying situation information on a display. Thus using PFs, we can effectively understand and analyze the problem and then re-use our knowledge in solving them. However, problem frames are less adapted in the industry because of the lack of standard notations and tools.

Static and dynamic testing in the software development life cycle
In the past decade, the art and practice of hacking has taken a significant turn for the worse. From the volume and complexity of attacks to the growing audience of international participants who hack for fame or fortune, hackers are modern-day pirates seeking adventure on the high seas of the Internet.
But what makes this trend even more critical is the size of the attack surface the Internet makes possible. We live in an increasingly connected world, where physical or package security is no longer the hacker's obstacle. Instead, knowledge of network protocols, applications, and an ever-growing list of exploits and utilities make up the hacker's toolkit.

The Data Scientist at Work
Data scientists need business knowledge; they need to understand the enterprise data; they need to know how to deploy technology; they have to understand statistical and visualization techniques; and, most importantly, they need to know how tointerpret the results. For example, if a discovery exercise shows that the number of storks born has a strong correlation with the number of babies born one year later, data scientists should have sufficient knowledge to conclude that these variables do not have a direct relation, but that they are both dependent on a third variable, one that probably hasn’t been included in the study yet.

Disaster Recovery Site Selection: Factors and Approach
For a DR strategy to work as per design, one of the important contributors is DR site as it will define service availability to customers during disasters. Further section details about factors to be considered for DR site selection with an approach. DR site is very crucial for any business as it will help to keep business running in adverse scenarios. DR site selection is crucial decision as it will impact availability of services to client, RPO/RTO requirements and service performance. Some of the factors which need to be considered are:

Blend Strategy & Governance To Drive Business
The role of CIO in each of these three different state is different. So, it is very important to have a clear picture of where your organisation is heading towards. Then the CIOs need to start assessing and evaluating internal capabilities to meet those goals. Once the gap analysis is done, CIOs need to make strategies to fill those gaps and identify the right partners to work with. While doing so, CIOs must put in place a robust control mechanism with full ownership of key functions associated with enterprise architecture and standards.

Quote for the day:

"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." -- William Edwards Deming

November 23, 2013

Are CIOs an Endangered Species?
Forrester Research VP Sharyn Leaver and Dachis Group Chief Strategy Officer Dion Hinchcliffe recently took part in an online debate over whether the role of the CIO is still relevant today. (Leaver argued yes, Hinchcliffe no.) Ever wondered about the importance of the position in your company? Here are four of the major questions to consider, and the arguments on each side.

Impact of Cloud Computing – Part 2
As Cloud Computing‘s adoption increases, it starts changing the way Businesses, Governments work. Here are a few links (one small sample) of how Cloud impact industries and governments. As it spreads, it will change the business models, IT delivery models and even the way governments (local and global) work together. There will be a few outlier applications like Cloud as Brain which are now in their infancy but have lots of interesting future possibilities.

Design Considerations For Converged Networking On A Budget
For the VM traffic the decision is rather easy. We go for Switch Independent with Hyper-V Port mode. Look at Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management to read why. The exceptions mentioned there do not come into play here and we are getting great virtual machine density this way. With lesser density 2-4 teamed 1Gbps ports will also do. But what about the team we use for the other network traffic. Do we use Address hash or Hyper-V port mode. Or better put, do we use native teaming with tNICs as shown below where we can use DCB or Windows QoS?

IT: Don't let the CEO wonder what you do all day
Corporate executives may think enterprise IT systems are like home computers: You set them up and they keep running with little or no intervention as long as security updates and patches are set to automatically download. It's hard to argue with the logic that servers costing $50,000 or more should have at least the same capabilities as the $1,000 Macs or PCs sitting on their desks at home. ... Indeed, IT often goes unappreciated unless and until something fails to work as expected.

In Command, but Out Of Control
In this first part of the video series by Abhilash Nambiar, Lt. General Paul Van Riper talks about how his 40+ years in the marines shaped his views of how some of the most productive groups are self-organized. Self-organized groups in combat or in business are best able to solve what he calls complex, wicked problems. He describes how two self-organized teams he led, one in Vietnam and the other as Red Team Commander in the Millennium Challenge 2002, were able to come up with unique winning solutions.

Business leaders lacking confidence in IT
Looking at disruptive incidents, in relation to data protection, security, or availability, as well as the pain that occurs because of them — a majority of respondents said that budgets were the reason that their organizations failed to achieve success. However, 35 percent also noted workload or resource constraints, 33 percent claimed that a lack of planning and anticipation, and 32 percent said a lack of knowledge and skills led to their problems. At the same time, one in five pointed to a lack of trust in existing technology as a key limiter to success.

Why innovators make terrible firefighters
Business fire fighting makes for terrible innovation. ... A pressing problem needs to be solved immediately, and the existing operating system needs to be repaired and brought back on line as quickly as possible. In fire fighting, there's no time for research, or reflection, or idea generation. It's get the thing back on line as quickly as possible, with as little disruption as possible. It's perfectly fine to knock down some pre-conceived notions or limitations, just so we can return to status quo as quickly as possible. And don't worry, we'll clean up the debris later.

Tech Industry Leaders Dissect Botched Healthcare.gov Launch
Bourgeois and other panelists advised federal IT leaders to adopt a more iterative development model for future technology projects, as has become commonplace in industry. John Landwehr, vice president of digital government solutions at Adobe, recalled a time when the software vendor worked on a long-term release schedule, like a complete overhaul of Photoshop that could take a year-and-a-half of development or longer.

Narrative Science Applies AI to Suspicious Activity Reports
The first analyzes data and finds facts, such as Company A beat expectations or Company B's long-term debt is larger than any other company in its sector. "Those facts are not enough and they're too much," Hammond says. "You don't want to know everything about everything." The second piece is a module that evaluates the importance and interestingness of the facts. Importance is defined by the domain of interest — if you're looking at the stock market, a company going bankrupt is important. "Interestingness" depends more on the user.

The 4 Key Pillars of Hadoop Performance and Scalability
Open-source Hadoop has emerged as the go-to software solution in tackling Big Data. For organizations looking to adopt a Hadoop distribution, Robert D. Schneider---the author of Hadoop for Dummies---has just released an eBook entitled the Hadoop Buyer’s Guide. In the guide, sponsored by Ubuntu, the author explains the main capabilities that allow the Hadoop platform to perform and scale so well. What follows is a brief overview of these four key pillars of Hadoop performance and scalability.

Quote for the day:

"People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel" -- Maya Angelou