Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 26, 2014

Enough PaaS vs. IaaS: The cloud is really about Services as a Platform
Two things have happened since that definition was first put forth. The first is that IaaS providers, especially Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, have delivered services that blur the lines between platform and infrastructure. In Amazon’s case, it evolved a set of a services from the infrastructure up to include middleware services (RDS and Elastic Beanstalk, for instance), as well as deployment and ongoing operations services such as Autoscaling and Opsworks.

Top 10 InfoSec Careers Influencers
Each of these Influencers has a substantial impact on InfoSec careers. Their influence ranges from education and training to recruitment, research and management. Our selections include some of the nation's most recognized leaders in promoting information security careers. But they also include a few individuals who focus on growing the profession behind the scenes. How did we choose the Influencers? We queried our board of advisers and other information security thought-leaders to identify candidates, with the editors making the final decision.

Internet of Things: What Strange Things Can Happen
IDC anticipates that more than 200 billion connected devices will be in use by 2021, with more than 30 billion being autonomous devices. Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) predicts some 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020. How will having lots of things connected change everything? Find the answer in the infographic. With all this, Internet of Things is coming and will be here to stay soon. Whether we, the humans are ready to take on this evolution remains to be seen.

Judge Partially Dismisses Oracle Lawsuit Against Solaris Support Providers
"While a customer may choose to engage a third party instead of Oracle to provide support services on Oracle hardware, under such circumstances neither the third party nor the customer may access or use Oracle's support website," Oracle said. "In particular, neither the third party nor the customer may use official, Oracle-authored Solaris updates to support the Oracle software running the hardware."

Best Value BI Trends: BI Embedded into Business Processes and Decision Making
The key to business value from BI is that it is “actionable” -- meaning based on her analysis the business person can do something meaningful with the data. Embedding BI into business processes means the business and IT understand that the workflow needs to include analytics not as the end result of BI, but as the fuel that drives business activity. The goal is managing and improving business performance, not analyzing reports.

Information Security Management at HDFC Bank: Contribution of Seven Enablers
As an early adopter of COBIT 4.1, HDFC Bank’s IT governance journey started almost six years ago, when COBIT 4.1 was just introduced. Almost all of the 34 IT processes defined in COBIT 4.1 were adopted by the bank. Following COBIT 5’s introduction in April 2012, HDFC Bank took some time to consider a migration. Because the bank has successfully implemented COBIT 4.1 to great benefit, it will not immediately migrate to COBIT 5. However, the seven enablers introduced by COBIT 5 were intuitively adopted by HDFC Bank even before these were popularised in COBIT 5.

Think you need Hadoop? Think again
In the big data buzz, Hadoop has been the big data solution of choice leaving many feeling like Hadoop is their only option for harnessing big data. However, there are many other big data options out there that offer different features than Hadoop, and may actually fit your business needs better. Flash array storage, in particular, has made it easier to create fast, affordable storage options, so check out these other big data solutions before settling on Hadoop.

Interview: The Need for Big Data Governance
The right approach to all these problems is to have a data quality “firewall” that filters data rather like internet traffic. And you can’t create that firewall unless you first have a definition of what “good data” looks like. IT will have technical definitions of good data – no characters in a number field, for example. But ultimately, only the business knows what defines business-ready data, therefore IT has to collaborate with them to create the business rules. And those business rules need to be in place before any new big data project, not after.

Agile testing is not about automation
If you buy into the premise of the Agile testing quadrant, only roughly half of the mentioned testing practices are applicable for automation – and these are primarily technology-facing tests. Aren’t the business-facing tests just as important? I would definitely argue that they are, especially for assessing if you are actually building the right thing for your users. It doesn’t matter if the smallest pieces of your system work well if they haven’t been assembled into something your users want or need.

Top Architecture & Governance Principles for 2014
Following are some of the key architecture and governance principles that you could adopt for your project for this year 2014. The architecture principles could be seen as “guiding principles” based on which team would want to design, develop and test the applications. ... Sooner than later, it may be good idea to create a software quality metrics to measure some of the non-functional software code quality characteristics

Quote for the day:

"To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way." -- Pat Riley

January 25, 2014

Scientific Thinking in Business
While data is essential for scientific decision making, theory, intuition, and imagination remain important as well—to generate hypotheses in the first place, to devise creative tests of the hypotheses that we have, and to interpret the data that we collect. Data and theory, in other words, are the yin and yang of the scientific method—theory frames the right questions, while data answers the questions that have been asked. Emphasizing either at the expense of the other can lead to serious mistakes.

7 ways to transform into a connected leader
According to Delight Leadership Inc., a ‘connected leader’ is one who holds him/herself in high regard. These leaders take their personal care and growth seriously, and understand that in order to develop as a person and to lead thousands in a transformational way; they must first do the work – the inner work that lets them evolve into a better version of themselves (that can in turn profoundly captivate and influence others). Here are 7 Ways to begin to transform into a Connected Leader:

CIOs need a System of Engagement with the CMOs
CIOs are being asked to fast-track the implementation of Systems of Engagement. What options does the CIO have? Moore explains that the demand for Systems of Engagement is driven by the need to collaborate in the disaggregated ecosystem we find ourselves in today. Compelling technologies are easily accessible in the social media that control our personal lives. We get so used to (and spoiled by) these technologies that we expect the same experience at work.

Can problem solving be taught?
“Good innovative problem solving has to be collaborative,” he says. “You can do it on your own, but group conversations can spark new thoughts and solutions much quicker than individuals will. It will also, usually, be a much richer experience and, if you’re going to teach someone problemsolving techniques, then they, at least in part, have to be able to run a team of problem solvers.” The trick, it seems, is for leaders to design and empower teams to break problems down and design solutions.

Location-based services: Controversy at every level
Overall, location-based services use three different levels of accuracy -- vicinity to within a block or two (derived from GPS coordinates), presence (establishing that you are inside a given building or store) and department (pinpointing your location within a given store). Shopkick makes use of the presence level, primarily; it's also the level that's demonstrating the most commercial success and producing the most fears about Big Brother-style surveillance.

Dueling R and Python, Contest 1A
The Python and R code in this admittedly simple example is remarkably similar. Indeed, driven by the numpy/pandas libraries, Python reads more like R than it does core Python. Python/pandas is the performance winner with this exercise on my 16G Wintel notebook. In the early morning with plenty of wifi bandwidth, both download/unzips complete in about 10 minutes. The data frame creations, though, are much faster in Python-pandas than they are in R – 2.5 minutes vs 14 minutes – probably to some extent reflecting the R kluge for column selection.

7 Principles to Enable Agile Projects Through Enterprise Architecture
The strategy, governance and co-ordination of this changing landscape is often referred to as Enterprise Architecture. At this point you might be wondering there is a way to join Agile projects with EA in perfectharmony. If there is, I haven’t discovered it. What I can offer you is some principles, based upon what has worked in organisations that I have worked with.

Using Auto-Classification to Improve Your Information Governance Practices
Governance is still lacking in many organizations as around 85% of users still manually identify records, but are not clear which content is valuable and not valuable, and as a result, there is considerable fear towards the regulatory impact of deleting information. New auto-classification technologies can take the burden off the end user by eliminating the need for them to manually identify records, by providing automatic identification, classification, retrieval, archival, and disposal capabilities for electronic business records according to governance policies.

Sizing Up the Changing IAM Market
"The cloud versus enterprise divide to IAM was never a comfortable situation, but had become quite clear cut," says Andy Kellett. That's why Salesforce's move to offer an IAM that can be applied to both cloud and on-premises applications "breaks the mold," he says. ... Despite the moves by Salesforce and Microsoft, many organizations will still choose to work with separate IAM providers if their systems' features and capabilities match their needs, Gartner's Iverson says. However, the pressure is on these IAM providers to demonstrate why their technology is worth the extra investment, he says.

Highly-Available Load Balancing of Apache Tomcat using HAProxy, stunnel and keepalived
This article will describe the process required to set up a highly-available SSL-enabled load balancer using HAProxy, stunnel and keepalived to front a pair of Apache Tomcat instances. The configuration will start off simple, and extend and grow as more functionality is added. First, a session-aware HAProxy load balancer is configured. Next, Tomcat clustering is configured with session replication and the responsibility for maintaining session state is moved to Tomcat. Then, keepalived is added – providing a failover IP between HAProxy instances running on two nodes.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared." -- Eddie Rickenbacker

January 24, 2014

Windows malware tries to infect Android devices connected to PCs
The new malware, dubbed Trojan.Droidpak by Symantec, drops a DLL file on the Windows computer and registers a new system service to ensure its persistence across reboots. It then downloads a configuration file from a remote server that contains the location of a malicious APK (Android application package) file called AV-cdk.apk. The Trojan program downloads the malicious APK, as well as the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) command line tool that allows users to execute commands on Android devices connected to a PC.

Management technologies to ensure mobile data security and compliance
There is no shortage of management technologies available to address these situations. The key is choosing the right products and developing the proper policies to enable secure use of consumer technologies in the enterprise without detracting from their many benefits. Organizations often turn to device-focused strategies and legacy technologies, but a new breed of products and a different way of thinking may be required to strike the right balance.

Lack of Stronger Cyber Security May Cost World Economy $3 Trillion
Titled 'Risk and Responsibility in a Hyperconnected World', the report cautioned that there could be increased cyber attacks if there is a failure to strengthen capabilities for deterring such activities. Major technology trends, including massive analytics, cloud computing and big data, could create between USD 9.6 trillion and USD 21.6 trillion in value for the global economy.

Data Center Infrastructure Management - Where's the Beef?
There's a general lack of acceptance or understanding of what a DCIM tool is supposed to be. Is it asset management, capacity planning, resource management, environmental controls, automation, or all of the above and more? When the customer hears too many voices, they tend to ignore all of them, at least I do. To combat this issue, DCIM vendors will have to get better at highlighting and demonstrating value in a clear and simple way. I know this seems obvious, but I would argue that the majority of Data Center operators aren't listening yet, likely because they haven't "heard" the right message.

Living in Interesting Times—A View from the New Zealand Privacy Office
Leaving space to deal with the unexpected isn’t easy when even the “known knowns” —or should that be “known unknowns”? —occupy us full time. These include the government’s intention to reform the 20-year-old Privacy Act. The exact shape of the changes is still tba, but we’re hoping for announcements reasonably soon. Proposed changes by the Law Commission, if accepted, would include putting a few more items in our enforcement toolbox, to enable us to deal better with modern information practices and to speed up our current investigations processes. Fingers crossed.

5 Big Business Intelligence Trends For 2014
What's in store for business intelligence in 2014? In some respects, 2014 will echo themes heard in 2013, but the message is getting louder when it comes to visual data discovery, cloud, and mobile. Big data also will continue to garner attention, but people will take a pragmatic approach to adoption. Simplicity, meanwhile, will experience a second coming.

Why I did it: Former hacker Mitchell Frost explains his motivation
"In 2006, I was young and, even at that age, I could see there was a lot of corruption and media propaganda going on in newspapers and on television. At that time, I had a rather large and complicated botnet. With the botnet, I was able to use the compromised computers for almost anything; key strokes, DDOS, servers, passwords, pranks. I had several botnets over the years from a few to thousands and didn't do a whole lot of DDOS on servers because I had no need to."

Cool or creepy? The ethics of big data is on the table
Ethics aren't an easy conversation to have in a business setting, Davis said. The topic is huge, messy and, yes, personal, and it tends to get tacked on to a pile of pressing obligations. In other words, it's not a topic that's easily dispatched. But in the absence of legislation that keeps pace with technological advancement, Davis believes it's a conversation that should happen -- especially among those practicing big data analytics.

The Neuroscience of Agile Leadership
The more we try to convince people of something, the more they push back. It’s our brains telling us this doesn’t add up. We sense threat when we feel forced in some way. Employees need to own any kind of change initiative for it to be successful. There is a critical role that neuroscience can play in making successful change. In environments where there is less stress, there is more thinking going on, we can focus our brains to find meaning in our work, and we can learn to see change as part of personal and organizational growth. Neuroscience is adding new insight into how the brain reacts to change.

Real-Time Computer Vision on Android using BoofCV
In this article, a step by step tutorial will be given for writing a simple computer vision application on Android devices using BoofCV. At the end of the tutorial, you will know how to process a video feed, compute the image gradient, visualize the gradient, and display the results. For those of you who don't know, BoofCV is an open source computer vision library written in Java, making it a natural fit for Android devices.

Quote for the day:

"The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are." -- Marcus Buckingham

January 23, 2014

PayPal chief on the state of digital payments: Mobile is everything
"Mobile is the territory where we want to lead and be best-in-class at across the board," Marcus said matter-of-factly, stressing a need to put developer needs first in this sector too. Marcus implied that PayPal was able to overcome numerous competitors by making strides to tap into all of these different platforms. Just one example, Marcus asserted that PayPal was the first to be able to integrate itself into Apple Safari and utilize the iPhone's camera to scan barcodes to enable purchase power.

Neural Nets: Now Available In The Cloud

“We present the N2Sky system, which provides a framework for the exchange of neural network specific knowledge, as neural network paradigms and objects, by a virtual organization environment,” they say. That’s neural networks in the cloud, to you and me. Anybody can sign in and start using a neural net in ways that have already been validated. Schikuta and Mann even want to create a search engine for neural nets. Simply type in the problem you want to solve and the engine searches for nets that are already known to have successfully tackled the problem or ones similar to it.

Microsoft says it will let users choose where data is stored, but things aren’t that simple
Microsoft’s top lawyer has said the company will let non-U.S. customers choose to have their data stored outside the U.S. On the face of it, this would be a boon for the privacy of the firm’s foreign customers. But in reality, privacy advocates should dampen their enthusiasm. ... But there are two big things to bear in mind if you’re non-U.S. and hoping Microsoft’s storage choice will let you evade the watchful eyes of the NSA:

New Techniques Detect Anomalies in Big Data
In any case, it's clear that anomalies can play a big role, for the better or worse, in optimizing system availability and performance; when a process, application, or infrastructure component fails or slows down, it's typically presaged by usually multiple types of events happening simultaneously or in quick succession. Anomaly detection deciphers how this series of events and their patterns vary from the norm and enables experts to quickly determine what it means to the business. The power behind anomaly detection is neither a single technology nor a single technique.

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2014
The CIO job itself continues to undergo a profound transformation that is pushing business-technology leaders inexorably closer to customer demands and customer experiences and customer engagements; to revenue generation, enhancement, and optimization; and to sometimes-revolutionary new business models and operating models, and unheard-of new processes. In that spirit, I’d like to share my list of the Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2014, inspired by conversations with executives at hundreds of companies around the globe.

Five best Linux applications for enterprises
Linux has been a part of the enterprise back end for a long time and is becoming more prevalent in the office-side of businesses, from small businesses to major enterprises. So, what are the best Linux applications for IT managers and business owners to use in the enterprise? These five apps will expand the business's IT infrastructure and functionality while reducing the overall cost of maintaining an efficient, reliable business.

Dell Research: Can it deliver innovation from blank slate?
According to Menon, the timing for Dell's R&D push works well with going private. "From a timing perspective this (forming Dell Research) is perfect," he said. "As we go private there's an opportunity to focus more on longer-term trends." ... CEO Michael Dell introduced Menon and his team at Dell World in December. Dell Research was formed 6 months ago. If all goes well, said Menon, Dell Research will be the glue that brings the company's various units together in a "cross Dell way." Menon doesn't have to replicate IBM's approach, but take what he's learned from his more than 25 years at Big Blue and apply them in a Dell context.

Dimension Data and Application Modernization
In Dimension Data’s case, the firm has historically been positioned as a leading professional services firm linked to Cisco products and services. These new market initiatives are helping to broaden the range and focus of its professional, consulting, managed and support services. In fact, despite the anticipated introduction of continued new Cisco-related services in the coming years, we would not be surprised to see the Cisco-related component of Dimension Data’s service delivery decline from roughly two-thirds of revenue in 2013, to somewhere in the 30-40 percent range by YE2018.

European experts divided on success of cyber security
“Cyber security is a failure at all levels, including compliance, methodology, skills and technology,” said Lacey. While agreeing that regulatory compliance is necessary, he said it tends to encourage organisations to come up with the cheapest response. Lacey said regulation does not encourage innovation and tends to recognise outdated standards and models that give the attacker the advantage. The old “plan, check, do” model is too slow-moving and needs to be replaced with a military-style “observe, orient, decide, act” model that enables the faster response times required, he said.

The Secret to Lean Innovation Is Making Learning a Priority
Lean innovation embraces a philosophy of not letting progress get in the way of perfection. It leverages the Pareto principle that 20% of a product’s features (what’s distilled down into the minimal viable product) will most likely deliver 80% of the benefits sought by customers. As an approach, lean innovation lends itself especially well to corporate cultures, often engineering ones and others strongly focused on process-improvement programs such as Six Sigma. Its straightforward, step-by-step methodology makes it relatively easy to explain and to implement

Quote for the day:

"For a manager to be perceived as a positive manager, they need a four to one positive to negative contact ratio." -- Ken Blanchard

January 22, 2014

GRC programs on the rise with data management complexity tides
"There is so much new data they have to deal with," Gascon said. "Organizations are realizing the amount of information they are generating has to be managed in a way that they can more easily produce it when necessary, and also be able to protect it throughout the lifecycle." But with compliance already broadly deployed, new programs may be on the decline: Twenty-four percent of respondents said their organizations would implement a compliance program in 2014, down from 36% of the respondents in last year's survey.

4 New T-SQL Functions
SQL Server 2012 was released last April, making it the 11th major release of the product. Every new version has delivered new functionality that should excite developers, and this release is no different. With the latest release of SQL Server, Microsoft produced 14 new T-SQL functions. ... These functions will be demonstrated using the "SELECT" statement, so no specific database structure is needed. They can be executed against any database, in a stored procedure or other scripts, just like all other T-SQL statements.

The New Cloud Application Design Paradigm
In traditional application design, you forecast how much infrastructure you need, then purchase that amount as a capital expenditure. While it's difficult to really predict how much resource you'll need to run an application, the amortized cost of the resource is consistent: It's the inexorable depreciation of the infrastructure, which never varies whether the resources are 100 percent loaded or runs without a bit of load.

How Xerox Evolved From Copier Company to Creative Powerhouse
How exactly does Xerox get creative about imagining new education products and services? There are a few crucial steps and ingredients, says Vandebroek. First, Xerox employs ethnographic researchers to go into the “field”--in this case, a classroom--to directly observe how teachers work and how they might work more efficiently. Second, Xerox engages in what Vandebroek calls “dreaming sessions” with its clients.

Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management Views
Some DBAs are simply unaware of the depth and breadth of the information that is available from the DMvs, or how it might help them troubleshoot common issues. This book investigates all of the DMVs that are most frequently useful to the DBA in investigating query execution, index usage, session and transaction activity, disk IO, and how SQL Server is using or abusing the operating system. Secondly, the DMVs have a reputation of being difficult to use. In the process of exposing as much useful data as possible, sysprocesses has been de-normalized, and many new views and columns have been added.

Amazon Innovates With Its Business Model, Not Drones
The essence of business model innovation (BMI) is not a new concept. Indeed, creating disruptive new business models is at the heart of many entrepreneurial start-ups. However, in most large companies and corporations, business models take a back seat to brands. BMI should command more attention as business models, above products, services or brands, are the basis of competitive advantage in the 21st Century. The implications to this are significant.

Calculating the Median Value within a Partitioned Set Using T-SQL
I’m not sure exactly what got me to thinking about calculating the median in SQL, but it was long ago and I realized almost immediately that this could be quite a challenging assignment. SQL didn’t, at the time, have available any built-in functions for the purpose and I did find quite a few competing solutions out there but no clarity on the performance of the various methods. ... SQL 2012 now offers an analytic function called PERCENTILE_CONT that is capable of calculating the median within a partitioned set when it is passed an argument of 0.5 and the ordering within that set is specified.

Walgreens CFO tug of war between IT legacy systems and tech that could 'take us to glory'
We have other legacy systems that you could argue we need to update and refresh. But the problem with some of them is that they are so massive and so integrated that it is not even an issue of whether or not we can or should afford it; the issue is how do you do it and make sure that when you pull all these things apart and put them back together, it is going to work. But I think it is really forcing IT and finance and accounting to work together -- we're partners -- to really say what is the business case here and what value will it create and what are the milestones along the way?

Siccing MDM on personal mobile devices
The mitigation came in part from the fact that users need a domain account to connect to our corporate wireless access points. We don't advertise the SSID and we have a strong password that enables encryption. But the "security by obscurity" approach only goes so far, and it didn't take long for employees to spread the word about how to connect personally owned devices to the corporate Wi-Fi network.

ActiveJPA – Active Record Pattern for JPA
ActiveJPA is a Java implementation of Martin Fowler’s Active Record pattern over JPA. It wraps around JPA and provides useful abstractions to simplify data access. With ActiveJPA, models themselves act as a DAO and interact with the database without you having to write any additional code for the DAL. Since ActiveJPA uses the JPA spec, all ORM implementations (Hibernate, EclipseLink, OpenJPA, etc.) that implement JPA can be used with ActiveJPA.

Quote for the day:

"Who aims at excellence will be above mediocrity; who aims at mediocrity will be far short of it" -- Burmese saying