Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 05, 2013

How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts
There is widespread recognition of the shortage of analytical professionals. Lesser appreciated is the fact that most organizations are also way short on analytical amateurs. A May 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study on big data analytics predicted a coming shortfall of around 150,000 people with deep analytical skills – and a shortfall of 1.5 million business people with the know-how to put big data analytics to use.

8 key duties of the chief digital officer
Sam Ramji, vice president of strategy at Apigee, has been watching the emergence of this new C-title, and made some observations as to where these individuals should be focusing their efforts. He describes his epiphany coming from listening to digital leaders at the recent Chief Digital Officer Global Forum. (See -- they even have their own forum now...) Here are 8 key roles that should go into the job description of the chief digital officer:

BGP and MPLS-Based VPNs
The multiprotocol extension to BGP4, MBGP, was invented to carry such routing information between peer routers. So once we think in terms of routing 12 byte prefixes, there is a natural way to propagate the information. For security and scalability, MBGP only propagates information about a VPN to other routers that have interfaces with the same route distinguisher value. That reduces the chance of accidentally leaking information about Customer A to Customer B (quite easily done with routing distribute lists in a tunneling approach, or with route maps or distribute lists or prefix lists and ordinary BGP).

Obama says iPhone is insecure; DoD agrees
President Obama has revealed that he's not permitted to carry an iPhone. It's too insecure for the job, he says. Instead, he's stuck with a BlackBerry. Well, someone's got to have one still. However, it turns out that the Pentagon has also outlawed non-BlackBerry smartphones. ... Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment.

IT Consultants: Is Full-Time Work For You?
The perks of making the move can be tempting: the promotions, the bonuses, and the guaranteed benefits. So how do you decide? It would be nice to have a crystal ball; there is no sure thing. But you can still make a wise choice. Start by asking yourself why you're considering the change and what is drawing you in. Then, ask these four questions to help you determine whether a full-time position should be your next move.

PaaS system benefits go beyond just freeing up developers' time
Paul Burns, president of the analysis firm Neovise LLC, believes that PaaS has been used as too much of a catch-all. But he sees an increasing focus on moving existing applications to the cloud with a PaaS system. "You take an existing application and you make it run in a cloud environment and take advantage of some of the underlying capabilities like elasticity," he said.

Why Are So Many IT Projects Failing?
"Project managers aren't just project-based, they're supervisors," says Innotas CEO Kevin Kern. "They are managing solutions and applications, as well as managing the software developers, and there aren't enough developers, ever. So, project managers are being asked to take on so many responsibilities that their job descriptions get blurred," Kern says.

Provocative Questions for Analytics to Answer
Consider what young people are learning in school today. Concepts such as mean, mode, range and probability theory, once taught in freshman university statistics courses, are introduced to children in their early elementary school years. Children are taught these methods in a very practical way. For example, if you have x dimes, y quarters and z nickels in your pocket, what is the chance of you pulling a dime from your pocket?

What should a CISO outsource?
Ideally, there should be two parties working in tandem - internal and external (outsourcing agency). A steering committee (including CISO/CIO) should be in command. These days as threats become more complex (mobile malware, APT, organized cybercrimes), some niche services/solutions are best taken in outsourced model/cloud model - rather can implementing all in-house. At the same time, there should be overall visibility available to CIO/CISO (steering committee) at any given time.

Data security laws and penalties: Pay IT now or pay out later
By implementing data security measures already suggested or required, your organization can avoid a host of problems. Whether your organization handles personal information now, or may do so in the future, federal and state laws are likely to set the standard by which unjust enrichment claims will be made and damages calculated. Below are examples of what is expected.

Quote for the day:

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas A. Edison

December 04, 2013

Making data work: Why hope is not a strategy
There are a few things to consider when implementing a capability like this. Data storage, by the way, is not really one of them. Sure, billions of interactions may have to be captured, but it’s offline storage which is cheap, and it’s only the data that is actually used to make decisions. Therefore, data storage requirements go hand-in-hand with better informed (i.e. higher quality) decisions which means the additional returns will easily pay for more, cheap disk space (on-premise or in the cloud).

Best of unified threat management 2013
SonicWall scored the best ratings across the board from readers, with the highest score for its ease of installation, configuration and administration. Users liked SonicWall's breadth of security functions and features. They also applauded SonicWall's depth of security provided by individual functions, and Dell's service and support. Overall, voters deemed the Dell SonicWall firewall appliances as "excellent" and a "very good solution."

Twitter Hashtag Inventor Explains Why Patenting It Would Have Been The Wrong Thing To Do
Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter, but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them.

CIOs to Gain Authority, Better Alignment With Business Leaders
"We seem to be veering back toward the operational type role, and I think that's a bit of an issue," Brubaker said. Brubaker recalled his work as a congressional staffer in the 1990s when he helped draft the Clinger-Cohen Act, a major set of federal IT reforms that, among other things, mandated that large agencies and departments designate a CIO to oversee the technology operations.

Risks to the 'Internet of Things'
ISACA, an association that develops information systems and security practices and guidance, has issued a new study, Risks and Rewards of the Internet of Things, which shows the shift in perception about risk and privacy as the world becomes increasingly connected through the Internet of Things. "As this Internet of Things starts understanding the inter-relation of things, your data privacy is going to be a real issue in terms of understanding who has it and how they're using it effectively," Stroud says.

Seven Reasons for Agile Software Development : Introduction to Waterfall Model
This series of videos explain seven reasons for moving to Agile Software Development. In this introductory video, we discuss the traditional software development model, Waterfall. The subsequent videos discuss more about reasons for moving to Agile. Speaker: Raja (Rajamanickam), Enterprise Agile Coach, ProXL Consulting

How much ITSM process is too much?
You can’t design a process sitting in isolation at your desk. Not because you are not capable, or smart enough, but because the adoption of a process requires buy-in, and for that you have to get people involved. The trick is balancing consensus building with getting things done. A small core team, with representation from across your organization, is the best way to proceed. Just make sure the team is empowered to make decisions

Forrester: Three competencies CIOs need to embrace digital disruption
It will require clarity in roles, ownership and operations. Your role as CIO will vary, depending on your organization's context. But there are three essential functions and responsibilities of a disruptive CIO: soldier, captain and general. These roles can change based on the type of initiative, culture of the company, and relationships among business and technology leaders. It is plausible that a CIO is a general in one initiative and a soldier in another, but most would default to one of these three roles, which are described below.

3 reasons perimeter security is not enough for the cloud
Again – the potential for bigger breaches or catastrophic datacenter disasters is much higher in virtualized environments. The cloud is built for agility, which means entire applications can be spun up, cloned, paused, or deleted in a matter of seconds. It is crucial that you implement controls and policies to ensure that privileged users – or those who gain their credentials – are prevented from doing damage.

IT pros share blame for 'shadow IT' problem, survey shows
For the IT department, the reaction has often been, “Oh poor IT, if we could only stop the employees from doing this,” says Jennifer Geisler, senior director in McAfee’s network security division. Of the IT pros admitting complicity, 42 percent said they do it because they are “familiar” and “comfortable” using such services. A third said the “IT approval process for new software applications is too slow or cumbersome,” echoing the line-of-business managers. A quarter said the non-approved software “better meets my needs than the IT-approved equivalent.”

Quote for the day:

"Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion." -- Jim Rohn

December 03, 2013

Get started with the Data Format Description Language
In this age of big data, the bulk of the data begging to be analyzed is not XML, but rather it is other structured and semi-structured formats, both text and binary. Until now, no open standard has been developed that is capable of describing a wide variety of such data formats. Learn about the Open Grid Forum (OGF) proposed recommendation for a powerful language that describes many different data formats, the Data Format Description Language (DFDL).

(How To Do) XML Schema Validation
Judging by the popularity of this question on StackOverflow, it seems that a lot of people struggle to check the validity of an XML file against an XML Schema. It’s a shame that what should be a trivial task has wasted hours of developer’s lives. In this article the author try to offer a few alternatives for various platforms and hopefully make things a bit simpler. There are actually a few different options at your disposal. We’ll start by looking at what is probably the fastest and easiest option to get started with validation:

What Inexperienced Leaders Get Wrong
But as any experienced manager should know, IT is a classic illustration of the difference between bold strokes and long marches, one of my favorite managerial frameworks. Bold strokes are decisions that can be made at the top, implemented pretty quickly by command — acquisitions, divestitures, real estate purchases, layoffs. Long marches take time and the involvement of many people who must produce new elements and coordinate their actions before the change can be successful.

If CIOs became Tech company CEOs
There have been rare instances where a CIO transitioned and started selling products or services. These individuals were CIOs representing their past industries or a specific solution set; I remember one instance where the only thing such a CIO wanted to talk about is how her company had implemented a specific technology and she had lead the team towards creating the success story. She was not very successful in her pitch but told her story wherever she went.

Data Mining Reveals the Secret to Getting Good Answers
And they say their work reveals an interesting insight: if you want good answers, ask a decent question. That may sound like a truism, but these guys point out that there has been no evidence to support this insight, until now. “To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to quantitatively validate the correlation between the question quality and its associated answer quality,” say Yuan and co.

Can complex-systems be ‘architected’?
To some people – perhaps especially in the IT-related trades – ‘complexity’ is just a more extreme version of ‘complicated’: a quantitative difference, “complicated that we haven’t as yet quite pinned down the rules and algorithms for”. To me, though, I’d agree with those who argue that there’s a qualitative difference between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’: for example, the kind of complexities that we see in wicked-problems, where even the act of looking at a context can itself change the context.

Meet WISP, the wireless future of Internet service
A WISP is distinct from other wireless services we currently use. Most cell-phone service providers offer wireless Internet service—with 4G LTE being the fastest current technology—but that doesn’t make them WISPs. Cell-phone service providers don’t expect you to use their service 24/7, and most place very low caps on the amount of data you can transfer over their networks each month. Being able to access the Internet while you’re out and about is a distinct advantage, but LTE data rates are relatively slow, and coverage can be spotty—especially away from large metropolitan areas.

CYOD: An Alternative To BYOD?
‘Choose Your Own Device’ (CYOD) offers many of the benefits of BYOD without some of the drawbacks. ... Even with the reduced set of options provided by a CYOD approach, the challenges are formidable and help may be required to deal with the increased complexity. “We offer an ‘anytime, anywhere, any platform’ service that provides access to enterprise resources from any device,” said Garewal.

Report shows weaknesses in DHS cybersecurity
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, blasted the department for the findings Monday. “This report shows major gaps in DHS’s own cybersecurity, including some of the most basic protections that would be obvious to a 13-year-old with a laptop,” Coburn said in a statement. “We spend billions of taxpayer dollars on federal information technology every year. It is inexcusable to put the safety and security of our nation and its citizens at risk in this manner.”

Amid security concerns, cloud insurance makes headway in the enterprise
"Cyber insurance policies were designed for premises-based systems," said Doug Weeden, director of program administration at Cyber Risk Partners LLC's CloudInsure. Consequently, some cyber liability policies exclude losses incurred by a third party, such as a cloud provider, but others include clauses that protect the client regardless of where the data is stored. So, businesses need to closely examine their policies to see if cloud coverage is included.

Quote for the day:

"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art." -- Claude Debussy

December 02, 2013

Here comes a supercomputing app store
Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing. But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

Getting cloud capacity planning right in the face of oncoming growth
The tremendous revenue potential is driving virtually every hosting company and communications and IT solutions provider to invest in building out a cloud portfolio. The catch for providers is how and when to scale cloud infrastructure to meet increasing demand without overbuilding. Part art, part science, cloud capacity planning presents challenges to providers that need to figure in their own and their customers' needs.

Managing People on a Sinking Ship
When your business is facing declining sales, a potential buy-out, or even certain closure, how do you manage people who are likely panicking about their future? Can you keep your team’s motivation and productivity up? The short answer is yes: Even when it’s clear that a company’s in trouble, there are ways to help team members stay focused, deliver results, and weather the storm.

Benefits of a Windows Server 2012 R2 Core installation
"Common answers I get from folks when I ask why they haven’t adopted use of Server Core are: 1. I don’t have time to learn a new product/feature; 2. I don’t know how to use the CLI/Powershell; and 3. I’m not confident I could troubleshoot a Server Core box in an emergency type situation. While these are all valid concerns, they don’t merit the outright boycott of this new server deployment methodology."

BYOD's Achilles heel: Billing and losing group buying power
Employees get to use the device they want and the enterprise doesn't have to hand out smartphones anymore. But the returns on these plans have been sketchy. Why? No one has figured out proper billing arrangements. ... With BYOD plans what used to be a corporate expense winds up in an expense report or a stipend. What would be a large contract is splintered into many little consumer deals. More money could be spent on BYOD plans and tracked less than the good ol' days of corporate issued smartphones.

Why COOs are growing in importance
These objectives are, of course, integrated into the responsibilities of all board members and managers within their own areas, but a COO is able to put a specific emphasis and focus on quality and efficiency. At PGGM, we do that through a “lean” program that has the objective of, step by step, improving the processes within the company; I’m at the center of that. In my case, my targets are set very specifically according to these responsibilities – my most important goals are related to the lean program, and I also have targets relating to service levels, cost control and cost reduction.

High-Performance Transact-SQL with Window Functions
These functions are based on an amazingly profound concept in standard SQL (which is both an ISO and ANSI standard)—the concept of windowing. The idea behind this concept is to allow you to apply various calculations to a set, or window, of rows and return a single value. Window functions can help to solve a wide variety of querying tasks by helping you express set calculations more easily, intuitively, and efficiently than ever before.

Selling SaaS: Operational requirements for consumers vs. businesses
The key to successfully selling Software as a Service (SaaS) across all market segments is recognizing and addressing the different operational requirements among different buyer groups, which often stem from the value propositions that drive SaaS in the consumer, SMB and enterprise market segments. ... The bottom line is that the operations of all cloud services depend on effective management tools and good management visibility.

Google Nexus phones are vulnerable to attack via Flash SMS messages
On Google Nexus phones, when such a message is received, it gets displayed on top of all active windows and is surrounded by a semi-transparent black overlay that has a dimming effect on the rest of the screen. If the message is not saved or dismissed and a second message is received it gets placed on top of the first one and the dimming effect increases. When such messages are received, there is no audio notification, even if one is configured for regular incoming SMS messages.

The Subject and Discipline of Business Architecture
This article discusses the phenomena of Business Architecture considering both its subject and discipline. Without knowing the subject of Business Architecture, it is very difficult to justify the scope and extension of the role of a Business Architect, i.e. the discipline. Many Managers and Architects can say – “What’s the problem? By identifying stakeholders and collecting their viewpoints, one could essentially define a Business Architecture”. Unfortunately, this approach is the major fault that leads to many contradicting opinions about this subject.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment." -- Thomas Carlyle

December 01, 2013

Microsoft's Software Licensing: Why I've Had Enough
It gets better, as Microsoft now offers "Licensing Training and Accreditation for Customers." In other words, if we invest even more time and money with Microsoft, it will bestow on us formal credentials saying we've mastered its convoluted licensing. At that point, can we then approve our own price proposal? We would be accredited, after all. No, all it would mean is that our arguments with Microsoft would continue longer than they do now. Much of the wasted time in recycling the same issue is due to a difference in opinion.

Governing the 'Internet of Things'
ISACA, an association that develops information systems and security practices and guidance, has issued a new study, Risks and Rewards of the Internet of Things, which shows that only 16 percent of Americans are familiar with the term Internet of Things. "People should be aware that the Internet of Things is coming into their lives and is going to be something that is an opportunity for them, to do things better, faster and cheaper," says Stroud, chair of ISACA's COBIT Growth Task Force. "And, also, on the converse side, it's going to be an area where they're going to have to watch some things like privacy issues. What's happening with their information and is their identity secure?"

How Green Is Your Network Cabling?
When cabling is being modified, or upgraded, care should be taken not to leave old trunking, and old cabling in place, unless it can be modified and updated. This is due to the fact that legacy cabling can cause obstruction and block airflow. There is also an added danger with leaving old cabling in place; it may not comply with the current “Reduction of Hazardous Substances” policy. Old-style cabling may release halogen if fire breaks out, leaving a company open to possible regulatory enforcement or fines.

Worm Targets Linux PCs and Embedded Devices
According to security researchers from Symantec, the malware spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in php-cgi, a component that allows PHP to run in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) configuration. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2012-1823 and was patched in PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13 in May 2012. The new worm, which was named Linux.Darlloz, is based on proof-of-concept code released in late October, the Symantec researchers said Wednesday in a blog post.

The death of the database
Many SAP (and other) customers will be running existing RDBMS systems for 20-30 years into the future, just as there are many people running 30-year old systems today. But they will be IT systems that businesses keep alive, whilst they innovate (and spend money) elsewhere. The real question is: will any of the existing incumbents have a place in the future? Hadoop and MongoDB are fast converging into the future, as is SAP, in my opinion, though from a very different direction. SAP has a different challenge, which is how its roots (internally and in its ecosystem) are embedded in the RDMBS market.

Social Network Analysis for Fraud Detection
As traditional techniques often fail to identify fraudulent behavior, social network analytics offers new insights in the propagation of fraud through a network - watch this short overview. This short overview of Social Network Analysis for Fraud Detection is presented by Veronique Van Vlasselaer, a student at KU Leuven, Belgium, working in the DataMiningApps group led by Prof. dr. Bart Baesens.

Increasing Oracle Database Availability with Fast-Start Failover
The key to this feature is a monitoring process appropriately named the Observer. The Observer is a component of the DGMGRL interface that is configured on a system outside the systems actually running the Oracle Data Guard configuration, which monitors the availability of the primary database. Should it detect that the primary database (all instances in an Oracle RAC environment) has become unavailable or a connection with the primary database is not able to be made, it will issue a failover after waiting the number of seconds specified by theFastStartFailoverThreshold property.

How To Achieve Data-Driven Design
Solution is to provide a Design driven methodology that helps businesses avoid severe and expensive design failures and set businesses on trajectory of consistent and sustainable improvements without busting the budget for the project. Solution is to give a rational methodology for figuring out how design is helping the business and learn from every interactions. Interaction could be triggered from manual or automated means. Knowledge gained could be used for iterating and improving upon specific experience related issues, without investing too much into fixing the entire design for small issues, which was how world used to do that.

Directing the Agile Organisation
At all levels, whether a team leader or CEO, an Agile Manager becomes responsible forfacilitating day-to-day operation, managing risk, providing governance oversight, and directing the strategic outcomes of the organisation. The key distinction is the act of facilitation, providing support to and removing impediments from their teams. Ultimately, by embracing and shaping change, an agile manager can position the organisation to quickly take advantage of new opportunities in the market.

A Balanced Score Card for presenting the value of Enterprise Architecture
Measuring the value of Enterprise architecture is not easy. In the presentation we will show an approach for measuring the value of EA by means of a Balanced Score Card (BSC). The BSC is a well-known management instrument for reporting value. We have developed a version of the BSC which is suitable to report the value of EA to management. In this presentation we will explain the EA BSC and show some preliminary results. If you leave your email address, then you will receive a PDF report with a compilation of the results.

Quote for the day:

"Everything's in the mind. That's where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it. " -- Mae West