Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 01, 2014

Decoding common virtual data storage terms
Sometimes we get carried away, and many times it's difficult to decipher virtual data storage terms, especially when you are comparing technologies or systems before a big purchasing decision. Just what is a "value-added, impactful solution" anyway? In this podcast, analyst firm Storage Switzerland LLC's senior analyst Eric Slack breaks down some common virtual data storage terms to help you decode sales and marketing gibberish and determine which technology and product is right for your environment.

Deadly Downtime: The Worst Network Outages Of 2013
No company is immune, no matter how sophisticated its technology. In 2013, some of the largest and most well-known technology companies in the world experienced downtime because of network failures. Companies such as Google, NASA, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and others all reported outages stemming from some problem in the network. Whether downtime is caused by a faulty piece of hardware, a software bug, a configuration error, or a denial-of-service attack, it causes the same response in customers, employees, users, and the IT professionals responsible for that network: Sheer panic.

Drake Baer: How To Create A Sustainable Culture Of Innovation
At Fast Company, Baer covers the intersection of psychology and work. He interviews the foremost minds in business for a living, including Clay Christensen, Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb. He also has a special interest in companies and bands on the brink of breaking big and the methods by which they do so. In this interview, he talks about why companies struggle with innovation, why leaders become irrelevant when they aren’t thinking forward, which companies are able to create sustainable innovation, sources of creativity and his career advice.

The security industry finds a dream enemy -- government spy agencies
The security industry has the enemy it always dreamed of to help it make the case for encryption adoption, but users looking to secure their data and communications need to be wary of claims made in marketing messages. Securing data in motion is the priority, experts say, and some large Internet firms are already making progress in this area, but encrypting data at rest without losing its usefulness will prove a greater challenge.

Rule Engine with Generic UI
A business rules engine works by separating execution code for business rules from the rest of the business process management system. This allows the end user to change business rules without having to ask a programmer for help. When a change is made, the engine will evaluate the change's effect on other rules in the system and flag the user if there is a conflict. Generic UI engine is a UI components that are common to various kinds of User Interfaces. That means: having generic UI Components that can be accessed using common Interfaces. Generic UI engine can be mapped to custom rule engine.

Enterprise mobility management: Embracing BYOD through secure app and data delivery
Given the paramount importance of security in IT’s mission, the natural instinct may be to try to limit peoples’ choice of devices or otherwise constrain the endpoint environment, even if it means sacrificing the benefits of greater productivity and flexibility. But simply barring the door to consumer device usage and BYOD is neither realistic nor desirable—it is inevitable that IT will face increasing pressure to provide access to any kind of app, anywhere, on any type of device. Simply put, IT has no choice but to enable and support consumer devices and BYOD; the only remaining question is how.

Four SSD best practices for efficient virtual machine storage
When solving the IOPS problem, IT managers have the choice of either server-side flash (basically, cache) or storage-side solid-state drives (SSDs). Either choice can deliver thousands or tens of thousands of IOPS (depending upon quantity) but they are not interchangeable; this is where the issue of latency comes in. Server-side flash has no more latency than other system cache, assuming the data is flash-resident -- meaning the data accessing the flash has to reside on the server as the flash does. If the system has to issue a read command to the hard disk drive (HDD), then there is no benefit to flash.

5 IT Hiring Trends In 2014
In a survey of 860 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters, 73% reported planning to hire more candidates in the next six months, and 24% percent said their additional hiring will be substantial. That's good news for anyone looking to make a change in 2014. But expect the IT landscape to change, too. Here's a look at five predictions on hot skills, evolving roles, and how social media will change recruiting.

U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service
The Obama administration effectively agrees. “While this country has made tremendous progress investing in and delivering high-speed broadband to an unprecedented number of Americans, significant areas for improvement remain,” said Tom Power, deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications at the White House. The disagreement comes over how far behind the United States really is in what many people consider as basic a utility as water and electricity — and how much it will affect the nation’s technological competitiveness over the next decade.

How the Financial Services Industry Should Use Big Data to Regain Trust
Analysing the usage of the many products that financial services firms have explains a lot about the behaviour of the customers. Although banks do not do this, or at least they say they do not do it, they have the possibility to understand customers better than customers understand themselves. The payment information explains a lot about customers. For that reason, when payment provider Equens (the largest pan-European payment processor) decided to sell the transaction data lot of negative reactions appeared and Equens had to withdraw their plan.

Quote for the day:

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last." -- Marcel Proust

December 31, 2013

Spreadsheet governance tools make corporate finance Excel use feasible
In fact, the event that led the company to share its story was the discovery of a "material deficiency" that allowed an incorrect number to appear in a quarterly earnings report, a clear no-no, given that the company is publicly traded and thus regulated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. "Even though we had people eyeballing that stuff, we still published a wrong number," the source said.

The firm behind Healthcare.gov had top-notch credentials -- and it didn't help
Though CGI Federal got something of a black eye from the rollout, the CMMI certification it had did not come under fire , and no one has made a case that it should. Project requirements were changed late in the development cycle, warnings weren't heeded, and time for testing was cut short. Those actions are all anathema to CMMI's careful and measured development processes. If a project that's based on CMMI runs into problems, process defenders will usually cite issues with management and decision-making.

2014: Time to Rethink Privacy
In 2014, IT executives are going to have to make some very difficult decisions about privacy. Quite often when we talk about difficult decisions, we mean that we know what the right thing to do is, but it's just hard to bring ourselves to do it. In this case, though, part of the difficulty will be knowing what the right thing to do is. For that reason, every industry -- nay, every company -- will come to very different decisions based on the concerns of their employees and customers.

Raspberry Pi and Raspian, hands on
What could be better at Christmas than a shiny new gadget? Perhaps a shiny new gadget that runs Linux? One that reminds me of Heathkit, and TRS-80, and days of experimenting and playing with computers for no reason other than curiosity, and joy, and learning? That's what I got, a Raspberry Pi! What I intend to write here is "Jamie's Excellent Raspberry Adventures": it will document my own experiences, discoveries, successes and failures with this little gadget.

eBook: Keep only the data you want.
In today’s information economy, organizations are facing unfathomable data growth rates. In fact, Aberdeen Group estimates that data is growing at a rate of 56% year over year. And now, the big data phenomenon means data is growing in every single operational and analytic application. In fact, data is growing to the point that many organizations are facing impaired performance of their mission-critical applications, along with increasing costs associated with storing all of that data.

MDM vs. MAM: Comparing enterprise mobile security management options
IT teams must be able to successfully address the mobile device management challenge to adequately protect organizations while still allowing enough flexibility to reap the rewards of mobility. The landscape of mobile management products is dynamic and large. A common query is, "Which product is right for my organization, mobile application management (MAM) or mobile device management (MDM)?" The answer can be both and perhaps neither, depending on the use case.

Big Data: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Big data contains a virtual treasure trove of information about customers, trends and countless other valuable insights which may have the potential to transform businesses. However, in the race to unlock this promise, many enterprises now find they have more data than they are capable of handling. Here’s how CIOs, data warehouse managers and others can build the business case for data volume management to help them more effectively manage this data deluge.

An Innovator's Resolutions
Nothing prepares us more for a a journey into a new year, ripe with new promise and new opportunity, more than setting out the goals for the year, creating agreements with ourselves as to how we'll conduct ourselves in this new year. We start by reducing or eliminating cynicism about our organizations, recognizing that as innovators we are the spark of creativity that will lead others to better ideas. We decide now that developing interesting ideas into new products and services isn't easy but is possible, given the right sponsors and demonstrating the right possibilities.

Technologies To Look Out For In 2014
Spotting the next innovation, that could benefit customers or challenge the success of existing products, is top-of-mind for every company. Keeping a finger on the pulse of every innovation that could bring such a disruption can be daunting. At Cisco, a self-nominated team of enthusiasts, unaffiliated with any particular function or business unit take up the challenge of identifying technology developments worldwide. Technologies identified by this team are assessed by a panel of Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, Directors and VPs and a few are selected as novel and most relevant to Cisco.

Can Robots Better Spot Terrorists at Airports?
Aviation and government authorities are starting to use machines in lieu of people to verify the identities of fliers by scanning their faces, irises or fingerprints. Dozens of airports in Europe, Australia and the U.S. already employ such technology so passengers can pass immigration checks without showing identification to, or talking with, a person. Now, several major airports in Europe have started using these automated ID checks at security checkpoints and boarding gates.

Quote for the day:

"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it." -- George Eliot

December 30, 2013

Managing Cyber Security Threats from Inside
In addition to NetFlow, security information and event management (SIEM) provides additional information about anomalous server or network behavior. SIEM solutions gather logs from various devices and systems, aggregating them into a correlation server. An event correlation application then mines unusual patterns or patterns known to be related to malicious behavior. Questionable activity is reported to security via email, SMS, or a Web portal.

Breaking down an IPv6 address: What it all mean
Let’s take a long hard look at an IPv6 address. Amazon supply IPv6 addresses with their EC2 cloud computers. ... There’s a lot of meaning packed into that strange-looking identifier. A few companies have tackled IPv6 but to most it’s just plain confusing. Why is it so confusing? And how can you decipher what it means? Connect to your AWS EC2 instance, find your network interface and its IPv6 address, and let’s do some serious IPv6 breakdown.

Introducing Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 4.1
Many customers across the world now include EMET as part of their defense-in-depth strategy and appreciate how EMET helps businesses prevent attackers from gaining access to computers systems. Today, we’re releasing a new version, EMET 4.1, with updates that simplify configuration and accelerate deployment. EMET anticipates the most common techniques adversaries might use and shields computer systems against those security threats.

Software License Audits: Myths, Facts, and Microsoft
In this report, you’ll learn how ITAM and SAM in the Cloud “reboot” Microsoft software license audit preparation. By “reboot,” we mean shuttering some processes, optimizing others, erasing the problem, and starting a fresh new approach to audits. You’ll get a step-by-step action plan to prepare for an audit now. and you’ll learn the specific areas in which ITAM and SAM on the Cloud slash time- to-compliance-position while increasing accuracy and reducing organizational angst. With the ease, speed, and agility provided by Cloud-based ITAM and SAM, Microsoft audits become just “sheep in wolves’ clothing.”

Top 5 IT security webinars in 2013
2013 was the year IT security grew up. Leaks and prominent hacks were the focus for major news outlets and adoption of mobile and new targeted attacks were on the minds of IT security teams. ... The best IT security teams have moved from chasing security to proactively developing risk-based approaches and integrating their security practice with the business priorities of their organizations and the tools and services in the market have begun to reflect that. Without further ado, here are the top 5 IT security webinars in 2013:

Know your storage needs before installing a solid-state drive
With SSDs, Martin said, different drives are suited to different workloads, so it is important to select the right drive for your organization's needs. "SSDs, random, sequential, depending on the make, some of them are better than others, some it's the other way," he said. "It's a different animal." And, he noted, hard disk drives do well with sequential reads. So, depending on the workload, traditional disk may suit your needs.

2013: The tech year in cartoons
From Tim Cook's 'pay cut' to Steve Ballmer's 'retirement,' here's a look at some of the year's biggest IT stories from the pen of Computerworld's editorial cartoonist, John Klossner.

Carey Smith, on Becoming the Team’s ‘Hyperlink’
"I’m sort of a peripatetic manager, and I sometimes describe myself as a “hyperlink.” I have an office, but most of the time I just walk around and try to determine if we’ve got any problems. It might be a minor thing, but I’ll take that and then try to track it back. Sometimes you step on people’s toes, but the point is that everything and everybody are connected in some fashion. And they’re connected, if nothing else, through me doing this sort of thing."

Meet Business Demands by Making BI Effective and Relevant
To realize the full value of BI, businesses need to acknowledge how a solution fits with key business processes. The goal is to equip business users with consistent and specific information throughout all levels of the organization so each group or business unit can best understand and apply the information. The full spectrum of users—from the executive team to line-of-business managers—can use solutions that are relevant to their day-to-day responsibilities.

What does it take to transform an organization before a crisis hits
What can leaders do before the depth and scope of their companies’ crises come into focus? How can they initiate major transformations proactively? As researchers and managers who have been involved in numerous corporate transformations in recent years, we have learned that applying standard formulae to corporate transformations is, at best, ineffective and, at worst, dangerous. What’s needed is a new approach that enables executives to transform organizations proactively without resorting to fear.

Quote for the day:

"You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations." -- Zig Ziglar

December 29, 2013

5 Top Social Media Trends For 2014
"It's no longer passed over as a fad or something that's going away any time soon," he said. "Social media is now part of our fabric of society, like mobile phones and computers -- it's a staple of our everyday life." In 2014, expect a shift in priorities: a bigger focus on social media monetization, user-generated content, a great acceptance of sharing information, and more. Here's a look at the big trends for next year.

The Three Power-People You Need on Your Team
The enemy of success is isolation. The higher you go the easier isolation becomes, but, it’s a devastating problem at all levels of leadership. Isolated leaders fear conspiracies and feel misunderstood. Worse yet, ivory-tower leaders resort to control through authority. Us/them thinking destroys influence. Defeat isolation and enhance success by developing a high-power inner circle.

Proposing Architecture and Process Governance for Risk Mitigation in Organizational Change
Transformation does present new and complex challenges entailing the need for a number of changes, mainly organizational and governance processes. It is therefore necessary to study and analyze the potential risks which may arise from such changes and transformations. This thesis proposes an integrated approach to managing the risks associated with both outsourcing and the transformation of the FTC into a civilian entity mainly in terms of change management, organizational and governance process, using Enterprise Architecture (EA) as leverage, supported by other disciplines and methodologies.

The Chief Data Officer: An executive whose time has come
It takes more than a steep investment, however, to squeeze business value out of data. Companies have to establish an entire system to use data to drive competitive advantage. I believe that the head of this system should be the Chief Data Officer (CDO), an executive whose time to shine has finally come. The sooner businesses can empower a CDO, the sooner they can turn data into a business weapon to achieve business success similar to the aforementioned companies.

Probability and Monte Carlo methods
A common use of the Monte Carlo method is to perform numerical integration on a function that may be difficult to integrate analytically. This may seem surprising at first, but the intuition is rather straight forward. The key is to think about the problem geometrically and connect this with probability. Let’s take a simple polynomial function, say

to illustrate the idea.

The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
Strategic plans all tend to look pretty much the same. They usually have three major parts. The first is a vision or mission statement that sets out a relatively lofty and aspirational goal. The second is a list of initiatives—such as product launches, geographic expansions, and construction projects—that the organization will carry out in pursuit of the goal. This part of the strategic plan tends to be very organized but also very long. The length of the list is generally constrained only by affordability.

Monty Taylor and Jim Blair on CI and Test Automation at OpenStack
The OpenStack community has a team working on CI and test automation for the OpenStack developers submitting code. They run their own infrastructure - an OpenStack cloud by itself. Given the complexity of the project, with dozens of dependent projects and over 300 contributors submitting patches every month, standard CI systems simply wouldn't work. We talked with Monty Taylor and James Blair to investigate the build and test challenges they face, and how they managed to tackle them.

Data protection and privacy law for developers
Data protection in EU countries is based on what's known as a "directive" - in this case, its 95/46/ec. The directive is prescriptive in some areas, and in others leaves things up to the interpretation of the national government. This means that in general, data protection and privacy legislation across the different countries of the EU is more or less the same, with some local differences. It's difficult to get things perfectly right in all jurisdictions, but if you start with the core rules, you are most of the way there.

Big Data and the Role of Intuition
Major big data projects to create new products and services are often driven by intuition as well. Google’s self-driving car, for example, is described by its leaders as a big data project. Sebastian Thrun, a Google Fellow and Stanford professor, leads the project. He had an intuition that self-driving cars were possible well before all the necessary data, maps, and infrastructure were available. Motivated in part by the death of a friend in a traffic accident, he said in an interview that he formed a team to address the problem at Stanford without knowing what he was doing.

Establishing Enterprise Architecture Metrics: Seven Essential Steps
Today, the value of EA has become preeminent for most companies integrating their enterprisewide business applications. Many practitioners realize that in a rapidly changing and evolving business environment, an enterprise must measure, manage, and improve its flexibility in successfully deploying integration initiatives. EA can engage both the business and IT teams from the beginning, and EA metrics can present a consistent vehicle to measure most of the critical elements of business value.

Quote for the day:

"Goals are like stepping-stones to the stars. They should never be used to put a ceiling or a limit on achievement." -- Denis Waitley

December 28, 2013

Aaron Levie: The most refreshing voice in the enterprise
At a time when enterprise IT is laboring under constant pressure from reduced budgets, outsourcing pressure, and escalating security challenges, Levie stands out as one of the most refreshing voices in the technology industry. He still believes there's a lot of great work to be done in the enterprise and he's not just a talking a good game. At Box he's leading a team that is hyper-focused on solving enterprise problems.

Testing Basics May Have Averted Obamacare Health Site Fiasco
According to CBS, the security testing was never completed. Fox uncovered a testing bulletin from the day before launch which revealed the site could only handle 1,100 users “before response time gets too high.” The Washington Examiner revealed, via an anonymous source, that the full testing was delayed until just a few days before the launch and instead of the 4 to 6 months of testing that should have been conducted it was only tested for 4 to 6 days.

Welcome to the Lean Service Desk, Part 4: Root Cause Analysis
Lean encourages a structured, disciplined problem-solving approach that is more like informal scientific inquiry. For that reason, we are interested in identifying the root causes of the problem as a precondition to trying to identify solutions. By separating these activities in a very deliberate way, it’s possible to gain enough understanding of the problem to increase the chances of finding solutions that in fact address it.

The Ideas that Shaped Management in 2013
Compiling extremely long lists, struggling to shorten them, and over-thinking it all, when the point should just be to gather some really good reading for you for any free time you happen to find over the holiday. So this year, instead, we thought about the pieces that most surprised us or provoked us to think differently about an intractable problem or perennial question in management, we reviewed the whole year of data to remind ourselves what our readers found most compelling, and we looked for patterns in the subjects our authors raised most frequently and independently of our editorial urging

Do You Know What Life Will Be Like In 5 Years? IBM's Top Scientist Does
In the 5 in 5 report IBM’s top scientists report on what the world, supported by smart sensing and computing, will look like in five years. ... In five years, cities will be sentient. More buses will automatically run when there are more people to fill them. And doctors will use your DNA to tailor medical advice and smart computing to diagnose and plan treatment for big diseases like cancer not in months, but in minutes.

Merchant Warehouse Provides Visual Overview of the State of the Payments Industry
Focused on 4 main quadrants, the Merchant Warehouse State of the Payments Industry will examine and provide up-to-date information covering all aspects of the payment industry from consumer credit trends to important information on regulations and technology. While individual sections will be update regularly as new information and data become available, each quarter Merchant Warehouse will deliver a new report highlighting major updates and trends ensuring that our audience is fully aware of where the industry is and more importantly where it is headed.

Global Stock Exchanges Band Together on Cybersecurity Initiative
In addition to developing cybersecurity best practices, the Cyber Security Committee will focus on establishing a communication framework among participants based on mutual trust and, notably, facilitating information sharing, including threat intelligence, attack trends and useful policies, standards and technologies. Part of that will also be enhancing dialogue with policy makers, regulators and government organizations on cyber-threats and supporting improved defenses from both external and internal attacks.

Establishing Data Governance Policies: Four Issues to Get Them Right
A first-rate data governance policy improves an organization’s ability to demonstrate regulatory compliance, respond to legal inquiries, reduce risk and increase data quality and business process management for increased employee effectiveness and better decision-making. ... Faced with rapidly growing data volumes, varieties and obligations, it is imperative that organizations have data governance policies and technologies that support them in place. The following four steps can help any company manage their data assets

COBIT 5 and the Process Capability Model Improvements Provided for IT Governance Process

Starting from a general overview of this framework, the structure of the Process Capability Model will be analysed in detail in this paper. Then, a comparison with the Maturity Model of the previous version of the COBIT framework will be discussed. At the end of this paper, it will be seen that the new Process Capability approach results in an improvement of the assessment process; and in particular, in the formality and the rigor of the assessment.

Retrospectives Applied as “PROspectives"
Don’t worry if the PROspective needs more time than planned. As long as the participants - the owners and beneficiaries of the PROspective - are willing to continue, it is fine. You, as the facilitator, are responsible for keeping the process on track to enable reflection, learning, and inventing actions for improvements. If you think the team has lost track of that and the meeting has become a waste of time then share that impression with the participants. If they want to go on anyway, it is their decision. You are the enabler, not the director.

Quote for the day:

"Men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail." -- Napolean Hill