Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 13, 2014

Review: 4 NAS appliances deliver big storage cheap
The four contenders in this roundup -- the LenovoEMC PX12-450r, the Infortrend EonNAS 1510, the Netgear ReadyNAS 4200, and the QNAP TS-1279U-RP -- are all 12-bay rack-mount systems that provide as much as 48TB of SATA storage. They can serve as iSCSI SAN targets, handle light server and database workloads, and support file sharing among Windows (SMB/CIFS), Apple (AFP), and Linux (NFS) clients. Naturally, they're also ideal targets for network backups, and they can easily replicate those backups off-site.

Agile Retrospectives: Why They Matter
Working with external entities and their different operating models can often prove challenging for organizations. Thus, "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" (Agile Manifesto) proves to be an integral principle in the region of Influence, as it encourages organizations and individuals to involve the end-user/customer/external entities earlier in the process of strategy and implementation to avoid surprises down the road, minimize technical debt and sunk costs over time, and deliver on a consistent cadence.

What Ever Happened to the 'FIDO Alliance' That Was Going to Revolutionize Authentication?
The Fast IDentity Online Alliance, as it's officially known started with six founding members, including PayPal chief information security officer Michael Barrett and the start-up Nok Nok Labs, founded by Ramesh Kesanupalli, as a core technology provider. Nok Nok Labs is building prototype code to support the new authentication specification called the Online Security Transaction Protocol (OSTP).

Answering Common Cloud Security Questions from CIOs
With the news stories of possible data breaches at enterprises like Target, and the current trend of companies migrating to cloud environments for the flexibility, scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness they offer, CIOs have been asking hard questions about cloud security. As CIO, protecting your data (and your users) is one of your key responsibilities. Whether you already have some cloud projects running or are starting your first cloud project, these questions and answers may provide you with solutions and introduce some new techniques.

The Business Technology Challenge of 2014: Information Optimization
Information optimization is a new focus in the enterprise software market. It builds on existing investments in business applications, business intelligence and information management and also benefits from recent advances in business analytics and big data, lifting information to higher levels of use and greater value in organizations. Information optimization also builds on information management and information applications, areas Ventana Research has previously researched. For more on the background and definition of information optimization, please see my colleague Mark Smith’s foundational analysis.

Brace yourself for a virtual sea change in storage
IT pros usually feel passionate about storage and have specific interests in the topic. In many cases, storage constitutes one of the largest investments (if not the largest investment) in the data center. That said, it's very much our responsibility to give a serious look at all of the new storage technologies that are available. There has been quite a lot of noise made about one upcoming technology: VMware Virtual SAN. It will soon exit beta and is quite popular with many virtualization professionals in the industry.

3 Ways To Steady Your Leadership in a Changing World
Why, we often wonder, does someone fall away in their leadership role? What happened within these individuals that allowed them to drift from promise to demise? And how do we not only spot the signs, but keep ourselves from meeting the same fate? Like a taproot that anchors a tree in order to weather the storms it’s exposed to, we as leaders need to keep ourselves steady. It’s a slow fade from having character to having no credibility, so we must put certain practices into our daily lives if we’re to remain relevant and continue to make a positive impact in our worlds.

Big data on wheels
The bottom line: data automatically generated by cars provides a fantastic “fuel source” for big data and analytics. In fact, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the automotive industry will be the second largest generator of data by 2015. This estimate is not surprising, since some plug-in hybrid vehicles generate as much 25 GB of data in just one hour. Fun fact: the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the leader in machine data is the utilities industry, with its bevy of smart meters, usage trackers, geographic sensors and other monitoring technologies.

Microsoft Loses a Number to Try to Gain a Future
Power BI offers ways to move all kinds of data into and out of Excel’s rows and columns, both from corporate databases and from other data sources that Microsoft has gathered by crawling the web, and ways to clean it up so the numbers can work reliably. Public data is stored in Azure, which also serves as a link to proprietary data that corporate customers can look up from the field. The “BI” stands for “business intelligence,” the kind of comparative data analysis that is done both by stalwarts like SAP and by younger companies like Tableau Software.

Banks push for tokenization standard to secure credit card payments
Debit and credit cards based on the EMV technology use an embedded microchip, instead of a magnetic stripe, to store data and are considered almost impossible to clone for fraudulent purposes. Though the rest of the world moved to the technology years ago, the U.S. has lagged behind for a variety of reasons. However, after the recent Target breach that exposed data on 40 million debit and credit cards, calls to adopt the standard in the U.S. have become more strident. MasterCard and Visa have said they want merchants and banks to be ready to start accepting EMV cards by October 2015.

Quote for the day:

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” -- Harvey S. Firestone

February 12, 2014

For international travelers, is basic business data security enough?
Lackey said travelers may encounter a greater quantity of threats abroad, but much like how most traffic accidents happen within a mile of one's home, users are more likely to be compromised by the Wi-Fi network of a local café they frequent than a connection they use in a foreign country. To protect devices while abroad, Lackey advised travelers to take as few computing devices as possible, especially to Russia and China, and to ensure that the software running on all machines is updated to the latest version available.

Technology plays greater role in relationships
"I think tech is mostly helpful to relationships," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. "It gives people the ability to communicate in more and different ways. Text messages make it easy to toss out those quick 'I'm thinking about you" or 'I'm thinking about you, and I'm still mad about last night' messages. Communication isn't only about good things, right?" Olds said he's not surprised that more people didn't complain about technology getting in the way of their relationships or at least irritating them

U.S. to offer companies broad standards to improve cybersecurity
Exactly one year after President Barack Obama issued an executive order directing a Commerce Department agency to compile voluntary minimum standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, is due to issue guidelines, which companies have no obligation to adopt. Drafters of the framework had to allay concerns by many in the private sector that their voluntary standards could someday become regulations. The threat of restrictive rules has helped stall progress on passing a cybersecurity law in Congress.

CRM Will Be at the Heart of Digital Initiatives for Years to Come
"CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives in coming years. This is one technology area that will definitely get funding as digital business is crucial to remaining competitive," said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner. "Hot areas for CRM investment include mobility, social media and technologies, Web analytics and e-commerce." Gartner expects CRM market growth to stay moderate in 2014, following three strong years of investment. CRM software revenue is forecast to reach $23.9 million in 2014, with cloud revenue accounting for 49 percent.

Regulation leads list of top ten risks for 2014
Regulatory changes and scrutiny are the risks business leaders are most concerned about for 2014, according to a new survey conducted by North Carolina State University’s Enterprise Risk Management Initiative and consultant Protiviti. “It’s a message for policymakers,” said Jim DeLoach, CPA, a Protiviti managing director. “… The bottom line is, it does have a cost in that it does affect business and it does affect decision-making around hiring and investing.”

FATCA tax deal with U.S. takes some heat off Canadian banks
Canada has finalized a deal with the U.S. government that takes a lot of heat off of Canadian banks — but could spell big problems for thousands of their customers. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and National Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay have signed the agreement to implement the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Introduced in the U.S. in 2010, the law is meant to track down U.S. tax cheats living abroad.

Is user activity monitoring the only way to spot stolen credentials?
Automated security tools can only take an organization so far in this battle, Chuvakin noted, regardless of what many vendors would lead enterprises to believe. ... "A lot of things can be done by algorithms, but there is still the need for somebody to say, 'That looks pretty bad,' or 'No, based on what I know, this is not a compromise.'" Chuvakin said. "That's just the context that a machine may not have, but the human analyst can figure it out."

Attackers use NTP reflection in huge DDoS attack
The attack could be larger than the one last March against Spamhaus, a spam-fighting organization and CloudFlare customer whose website was hit by a 300Gbps DDoS attack, which was considered to be the largest in history at the time. CloudFlare reported then that it caused congestion at critical Internet exchange nodes in Europe. However, other companies later challenged the reported impact.

5 Ways We Neglect Our Own Creativity - And How To Bring It Back
Building things with our hands, words, and minds can be a bit terrifying. Our subconscious is at work during the creative process and sometimes what lives there can be scary. But while your mind might be telling you to run the other way, resist the urge. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it in his Letters to a Young Poet: "Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?” In other words: It pays to be a little tortured.

Big Data Analytics for Security
Big data analytics—the largescale analysis and processing of information—is in active use in several fields and, in recent years, has attracted the interest of the security community for its promised ability to analyze and correlate security-related data efficiently and at unprecedented scale. Differentiating between traditional data analysis and big data analytics for security is, however, not straightforward. After all, the information security community has been leveraging the analysis of network traffic, system logs, and other information sources to identify threats and detect malicious activities for more than a decade, and it’s not clear how these conventional approaches differ from big data.

Quote for the day:

"Success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to changes as they occur" -- Jack Welch

February 11, 2014

Microsoft staffs up its evolving Internet of Things team
Microsoft is staffing up its Internet of Things (IoT) team that is part of its unified Windows division and may be expanding its charter, as well. The IoT team, at least originally, was the renamed Microsoft Embedded team, according to a couple of sources of mine. Microsoft management moved the Embedded team from under the Windows Server group to the unified Windows org under Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson last fall.

RenewIT: The EU Project Focusing On Green Energy
The project will be led by the energy research center at the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) and will use experts on renewable energy systems (from Aiguasol in Barcelona) and energy storage (at the Technische Universität Chemnitz in Germany), data center monitoring (Loccioni in Italy), workload and application energy management (BSC) and energy efficient data center design (Deerns in Amsterdam).

Shape the Culture You Want through the Stories You Tell
One of the values that Johnson believed in and that he wanted to instill in his team at Facebook was rewarding the people who fixed stuff. The natural tendency for many engineers is to gravitate toward working on new and innovative systems, but the unsung heroes tend to be the people who helped make an existing system much faster or who systematically reduced a system’s error rate to make it more reliable. They’re the ones who worked on the less glorious tasks but were instrumental in getting things to work.

The Modern CMO's New Best Friend
Many CMOs have had to learn about data—and social, and analytics, and more—on the job. Trial by fire is fine, as long as that doesn’t turn into a full-time job as a fire fighter. However, without a strong analytics background, CMOs often feel they have the right strategies—yet no defensible or go-to strategies for repeating the solutions. The fact is, many shunned data as cold and out of touch with the emotional drivers of consumer behavior. The opposite is true today, with the volume of data on customer sentiment at an all-time high.

Creating Cloud Optimization with Network Intelligence
The direct proliferation of cloud computing has resulted in a huge boom in traffic over the WAN. There are more users connecting, a lot more data points, and the modern data center sits right in the middle. Throughout this entire cloud evolution – the infrastructure was forced to change as well. Edge and core routing needed to evolve to handle this influx of traffic and new content. Service providers as well as enterprises deploying demanding, mission-critical applications are facing unique networking challenges.

Handling Open Source Licensing
Arun Kumar, GM, Red Hat India says, “In an industry where there are changes and developments every single day, we have engineering teams that track every single change--a bug fix, security enhancement, or others, and ensure our customers’ mission-critical systems remain up-to-date and stable. It is not easy to do this, but with a team that is constantly on its toes and tapping into every single development, we have managed to provide the best services to our clients time and again.

Researchers uncover cyber spying campaign dubbed 'The Mask'
Raiu said The Mask hit government institutions, oil and gas companies and activists, using malware that was designed to steal documents, encryption keys and other sensitive files, as well as take full control of infected computers. The operation infected computers running Microsoft Corp's Windows and Apple Inc's Mac software, and likely mobile devices running Apple's iOS and Google Inc's Android software, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Nesting Levels in SQL
In SQL there is a hierarchy of data in which the outer level is the schema or database. The database is made up of tables (which can be base or virtual tables). Each table is made up of a set of rows. These rows have no ordering, but all have the same structure, so it is proper set. Each row is made up of columns. The columns are scalar values drawn from a domain; a domain is set of values of one data type that has rules of its own. These rules include the type of scale upon which it is built and reasonable operations with it.

CIO interview: The Met's Richard Thwaite on its Total Technology IT strategy
The main challenge in delivering the strategy is in getting the business to think through the implications of the technology, he says. The IT team needed to translate how technology could help achieve those goals. “Fundamentally, the tech is pretty old,” he says. “It’s had a long life and we’re at the state where it needed a lot doing in terms applications and infrastructure – it needed a complete refresh.” But reductions in budgets, combined with increased performance expectations, will have an effect on how the Met goes forward with its latest approach to IT.

Learning to Embrace Changing Requirements
The principles of agile software development were first proposed thirteen years ago. Unfortunately today there is a lot of confusion around what it is and how it should be used. I attribute this in large part to the fact that it became an industry buzz-word where “agile” became synonymous with “good” and the ubiquitous two-day training on scrum processes watered down the original intent of the agile software development manifesto.

Quote for the day:

"Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it." -- Colin Powell

February 10, 2014

This smartphone will self-destruct in 5 seconds
DARPA said on its website that it's looking for devices, such as sensors, radios and phones, that work as well as off-the-shelf commercial options but can be remotely triggered to break apart. IBM has been tasked with developing materials, components and manufacturing capabilities. The company, according to DARPA, is working on a "strained glass substrate" that will shatter. A trigger, such as a fuse, will be used in at least one, if not multiple, areas on the device.

Shouldn't there be a better way to curate global threat intelligence?
Curating threat intelligence has become one of the hottest topics in security. Gathering information regarding the threat landscape isn't a new concept, but determining what actually constitutes threat intelligence is still fuzzy, and its current buzzword status in the industry isn't helping. Indeed, vendor marketing teams use the term liberally when promoting their products, replacing the "next-gen" hype with this new version of security secret sauce.

Black Day at I/O Gulch
Not long ago, a crack team of SQL Server experts was flamed for a crime against database normalization they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from the taunts of academic relational theorists. Today, they survive as Website editors and software evangelists. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the DBA-Team.

The Principles of Effective Risk Management
Enterprise Risk Management is one of the core domain of Governance. In some business sectors, the success depends on an intelligent and effective risk management principles, framework and practices. The advancement in technology, like big data and analytics also plays a key role in making the risk management effective and adding value to the business. Other factors that necessitate a well architected ERM in an organization include, regulatory & compliance needs, security and privacy expectations, disasters and business continuity needs, etc.

To Succeed with Big Data, Begin with the Decision in Mind
BWTDIM means identifying the decisions that matter to your organization, the decisions that make the difference between hitting your targets and missing them, the decisions that “move the dial.” These decisions may be strategic or tactical decisions but are also often operational, day-to-day decisions that must be made at the front lines of your organization like the call center, the branch or the warehouse. BWTDIM means understanding how you must make these decisions, and how you might make those decisions to more effectively hit those objectives.

Why Open Government Data Makes Sense for India
Open Data Platform set up by NIC can be accessed at data.gov.in. This platform enables all government departments to contribute their datasets in open format. Thus, datasets are contributed are processed through a predefined workflow system for approval for publishing on the data portal. Citizens can access open data platform to browse, and search for the data that is relevant to their needs and can also download the datasets. Not only citizens, civil society, academia, research organizations, journalists and many others who need data for variety of purposes are the potential users of this platform.

Automakers push envelope on wearables, augmented reality despite regulatory concern
Another key area of focus for automakers going forward is creating unique augmented reality applications for use both inside and outside the car. “With wearables, that is another way of adding even more relevant user interface,” said Dominique Bonte, London-based vice president and practice director at ABI Research. “This is a way for the auto industry to bring advanced interfaces into the vehicle and bring more entertainment services into a vehicle in a non distractive way.

New network architectures and traditional components: Why both are key
To clients with questions about where to invest in their core networks, Chandler said he ultimately advises them to sit tight. "I believe we are looking at two things right now," he said. "The initial push was development of southbound APIs, so there was a lot of talk about OpenFlow and vendor-specific APIs. Now I think the second shift is over the programmatic access to the network, and now we don't care so much how we talk on the southbound API from the controller. There is much more interest in the controller and the applications the controller can run."

Maintaining PCI Compliance is a Big Challenge for Most Companies
The problem has to do with a tendency by many companies to treat PCI compliance as an annual end goal rather than treating it as part of a continuous risk management effort. "Too many companies still look at PCI as pure compliance and don't use it to mitigate risk," Simonetti said. "Often, compliance is managed as a project -- particularly as the build phase of a project." Once compliance is achieved, many companies simply stop paying attention, he said. "It is really a failure to use compliance standards and tools and a day to day basis," Simonetti said.

The Secrets of Database Change Deployment Automation
Dealing with database deployments is tricky; unlike other software components and code or compiled code, a database is not a collection of files. It is not something you can just copy from your development to testing and to production because the database is a container of our most valued asset – the business data, which must be preserved. It holds all application content, customer transactions, etc. In order to promote database changes, a transition code needs to be developed - scripts to handle database schema structure, database code, and content used by the application.

Quote for the day:

"Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it." -- Jim Rohn

February 09, 2014

Quantum Internet: First Teleportation to a Solid-State Quantum Memory
One of the building blocks of the quantum Internet will be quantum routers that can receive quantum information from location and route it on to another without destroying it. So the race is on to demonstrate this kind of technology, which has the potential to revolutionize communications. Today, Felix Bussières at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and a few pals say they’ve taken an important step towards this. But crucially they’ve done it for the first time over the kind of ordinary optical fiber that telecommunications that are in use all over the world.

Managing product binaries in virtual application pattern workloads
When you develop your virtual application pattern workload to be installed on IBM PureApplication System, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, or IBM Workload Deployer, you will encounter situations where your plug-in needs to manage product binaries. The product binaries may be yours or from a third party vendor such as IBM, SAP®, or Oracle®. In this article, you will see different strategies that you can follow to manage the product binaries and how your plug-in can access and install the binaries. You will also understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of these different strategies.

Interview: Ubuntu Takes on Hyperscale Using Open Source Technology
Ubuntu makes it easy to deploy and use the widest range of applications possible: from nginx to memached. We focus on making Ubuntu the best quality we can – everything should work beautifully. Not only do we deliver the widest range of applications, but we deliver them like clockwork every six months. This means that anybody who needs the most recent version of an application can get it easily. Another quality that users like is that Ubuntu is available everywhere – both on the desktop and on the server – making it an ideal OS for developers.

Why Wearable Computing is Waiting for A.I.
You could be eating in a restaurant, and Google Glass could, for example, tell you that it's the spot where your father proposed to your mother. Or that your friend will be late because of traffic, the salmon got bad reviews online, your parking meter will expire in 20 minutes, or the bathroom is through the bar and up the stairs to the right. Imagine that such knowledge could simply appear into your field of vision at the exact moment when you want to know it. That's where wearable computing is going. That's why the wearable revolution is mostly an artificial intelligence revolution.

How LinkedIn Uses Apache Samza
The most basic element of Samza is a stream. The stream definition for Samza is much more rigid and heavyweight than you would expect from other stream processing systems. Other processing systems, such as Storm, tend to have very lightweight stream definitions to reduce latency, everything from, say, UDP to a straight-up TCP connection. Samza goes the other direction. It wants its streams to be, for starters, partitions. It wants them to be ordered. If you read Message 3 and then Message 4, you are never going to get those inverted within a single partition. It also wants them to replayable, which means you should be able to go back to reread a message at a later date.

3 Ways To Be An Effective Self-Leader
As a self-leader, this is where you take the initiative to get the direction and support you need to do an activity or achieve a goal. Depending on the amount of competence and commitment you have in any one area, you need varying degrees of support and direction from others. On my fitness journey, I realized that there were some areas of fitness where I needed close supervision and direction because I was an enthusiastic beginner with very little competence.

Heat System Called Door to Target for Hackers
Over the last two years, Mr. Rios and Terry McCorkle, also of Qualys, said that they found 55,000 HVAC systems connected to the Internet. In most cases, they said, the systems contained basic security flaws that would allow hackers a way into companies’ corporate networks, or the companies installing and monitoring these systems reused the same remote access passwords across multiple clients.

Cloud computing defined: Characteristics & service levels
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Although this widely-adopted description of what makes a cloud computing solution is very valuable, it is not very tangible or easy to understand. So let’s dive a little deeper into cloud computing and why it’s different than just visualization alone, which is commonly mistaken to be cloud computing as well.

Bitcoin’s Political Problem
Money is always political. This is obvious enough when we argue about Federal Reserve policy in the United States, or who should next chair the interest rate-setting body. But for over 1,000 years, we have argued about the nature of our monetary systems and shifted between different ways of making payments. Seen in this historical context, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just the latest in a long line of challenges to prevailing technology—and to current political arrangements.

Anonymous targets Singapore govt with second tweetstorm
Anonymous has stepped up efforts to raise awareness over ongoing criminal procedings in alleged hackers in Singapore linked to the hacktivist group. ... The arrests included those of James Raj Arokiasamy, alleged to be the hacker under the moniker "Messiah", linked to the defacement of at least one government Web site; what it dubbed the "Singapore 5", comprising 5 men accused of civil disobedience involving pro-Anonymous graffiti on a wall; and also "the plight of all the anons involved".

Quote for the day:

"Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories" -- Polybius