Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 13, 2015

Pivotal CEO says open source Hadoop tech is coming
Multiple external sources have told Gigaom that Pivotal does indeed plan to open source its Hadoop technology, and that it will work with former rival (but,more recently, partner) Hortonworks to maintain and develop it. IBM was also mentioned as a partner. Members of the Hadoop team were let go around November when active development stopped, the sources said, and some senior big data personnel — including Senior Vice President of R&D Hugh Williams and Chief Scientist Milind Bhandarkar — departed the company in December, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Both of them claim to be working on new startup projects.

Keeping The Cloud Up--The Great Amazon Microsoft Cloud Reliability Showdown
In assessing what the results mean for organizations using AWS, CloduEndure was quick to point out that planning the location of infrastructure based on the historical number of errors and performance issues is probably not the best approach. While cloud provider issues are undeniably important, as I’ve said many times before, it is important to remember that the top reason for application downtime remains human error. The best way to resolve many issues is to be as redundant as possible – geographically and from a vendor perspective.

Obama to sign executive order on cybersecurity info-sharing
"The federal government cannot, nor would Americans want it to, provide cybersecurity for every private network. Therefore, the private sector plays a crucial role in our overall national network defense," the White House said. "The framework recognizes that no organization can or will spend unlimited amounts on cybersecurity. Instead, it enables a business to make decisions about how to prioritize and optimize its cybersecurity investments." Along with tech giants Apple and Intel, plus Bank of America and PG&E, companies committing to the framework include US Bank, AIG, Walgreens, QVC and Kaiser Permanente. Also joining in the effort are the Entertainment Software Association, network software company FireEye and online storage provider Box.

Transforming Customer Experience Culture Through Natural Language Processing
The new WDS Virtual Agent, manages customer care interactions by analysing data and learning from its human colleagues. Silently listening, it detects how human agents diagnose customer problems and offer solutions. In doing this it quickly develops the intelligence it needs to understand and solve customer queries itself, without having to be programmed. “Because many first-generation virtual agents rely on basic keyword searches, they aren’t able to understand the context of a customer’s question like a human agent can,” explains WDS’ Nick Gyles, Chief Technology Officer. “The WDS Virtual Agent has the confidence to solve problems itself because it learns just like we do, through experience.

Will increasing cyber attacks spell the end of username and password security?
Bruce Schneier, a leading voice on cybersecurity ... said cybersecurity-focused regulators and the constituencies they serve, might be better off focusing on outcomes instead of mandating specific security requirements. “Let the companies figure out how to do it. Good regulation regulates the results, not the process,” Schneier told the Guardian. “It always surprises me that people who understand there’s never a one-size-fits-all solution in other aspects of their lives, when it gets to IT, they start demanding – where’s the answer? Well, where’s the answer to burglary? To murder? There’s just a whole lot of things you do. And even then, the murder rate is never going to be zero.”

Anatomy of the Target data breach: Missed opportunities and lessons learned
Poulin suggests several attack scenarios, "It's possible that attackers abused a vulnerability in the web application, such as SQL injection, XSS, or possibly a 0-day, to gain a point of presence, escalate privileges, then attack internal systems." Not knowing the details, makes it difficult to offer a remediation for this portion of the attack. However, Poulin opines that IPS/IDS systems, if in place, would have sensed the inappropriate attack traffic, notifying Target staff of the unusual behavior. According to this Bloomberg Business article, a malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye was in place and sent an alarm, but the warning went unheeded.

Determining whether penetration testing is effective
Attackers are side-stepping perimeter defenses by getting company employees to initiate an external connection. The two most popular methods are using a phishing email or duping employees to visit a malicious website. According to Marrison, internally establishing a connection outside the company's network perimeter allows the APT attacker a way in. Cisco's 2014 Annual Security Report affirms Marrison's claim. It states, "Most organizations, large and small, have already been compromised and don't even know it: 100 percent of business networks analyzed by Cisco have traffic going to websites that host malware."

Facebook Finally Realizes Its Members Die
Not only do you need to know who to leave your house to, but who is going to run your Facebook account. If you set this up with Facebook, your selected buddy to the end will get to memorialize you with tribute status updates, post new pictures in tribute, and even accept new friend requests from people who didn't like you enough when you were alive to friend you, but somehow decided it was OK when you were dead. Truthfully, I'm guessing most people were already doing this on their own by using the credentials of their loved ones to maintain pages. This will allow you to select someone to be the caretaker (undertaker?) of your page, but the person won't get to see your private messages from when you were alive.

Simplifying F# Type Provider Development
Type providers are one of the most interesting and empowering features of the F# 3.0 release. Properly written type providers make data access virtually frictionless in F# applications as they eliminate the need for manually developing and maintaining the types which correspond to the underlying data structures. This aspect is particularly important for data exploration tasks where many competing data access technologies require a fair amount of configuration before they're useful. For all their strengths, type providers tend to be a bit of a black box; once referenced, they usually just work. Not being the type of developer that settles for magical incantations, I recently spent some time delving into their depths.

Getting Data Governance and Legal to Work Together
Legal is, or should be, the source of regulations about data privacy and protection in the jurisdictions within which the enterprise stores, manages, or accesses data. However, legal typically cannot translate these rules into operationalized practices that ensure the enterprise is truly in compliance with the law. Data governance can bridge that gap. It can provide an understanding of the situation in the environments that manage data, and help to identify potential gaps with respect to laws and regulations. Jointly, with legal, data governance can help to determine what solutions have to be put in place to deal with these gaps. These solutions will often be changes to business practices rather than changes to the underlying systems.

Quote for the day:

"Your greatest area of leadership often comes out of your greatest area of pain and weakness. -- Wayde Goodall

February 12, 2015

Building Microservices with Spring Boot
A distributed system decomposes the components of a monolith into individual units of deployment, which are able to evolve their own scaling requirements irrespective of the other subsystems. This means that the resource footprint for the overall system can be more efficiently managed, and the interconnection between components can share a less-rigid contract, since the interdependency is no longer managed through the runtime environment. In traditional SOA, the service boundary may encapsulate a breadth of functionality for a business function, centralized around potentially many data domains. A microservice architecture marries the concept of system distribution with the promise of managing only a single business function and data domain, which means that logically getting a handle on the capabilities of a subsystem is fairly easy to do.

Can Twitter Fix Its Harassment Problem without Losing Its Soul?
“There’s a bigger threat to not taking on this problem than taking on this problem, simply because public sympathy is going to go more in the direction of the abused than the abusers,” Shirky says.+ But while the time seems right for Twitter to act, it is far from clear how best to discourage such behavior. It does have methods in place to help deal with abuse, such as the ability to block and report a user who’s bothering you. Yet while that may help if you’re dealing with one or even a few bothersome tweeters, it cannot stop a deluge of nasty posts, and a determined harasser can always just make a new user profile and start the harassment anew.

Networks: The New Model for Business
These business networks are unlocking the ability for companies to extend processes and insights broadly and affordably to customers, suppliers, and other partners. Therefore, they're better able to engage with the participants across these networks in new and innovative ways. We'll look at the historical record for how open markets and communities are rapidly changing business platforms. We'll see how today's consumer business models -- exemplified by Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb -- are extending to business-to-business (B2B) commerce, allowing buyers and sellers to find and know each other openly and accelerate B2B transactions and commerce efficiencies.

7 Digital Business Transformation Lessons
With the roles of the CIO, COO, CMO and CDO mixing and mingling, exactly who is leading the digital transformation revolution? Sutcliff says that ultimately it's a C-suite agenda where they come together and all work together. "Because businesses can now buy things as a service and buy things that enable them, digital is being seen not just as a technical issue but as an enabler to the whole business that encompasses operations at every level of the organization," says Sutcliff. Sutcliff has huge respect for the role of the CIO and says they are continuing to lead digital transformation initiatives.

How Big Data Pieces, Technology, and Animals fit together
Oozie is a workflow scheduler. The oversimplified description would be that it's something that puts together a pipeline of the tools described above. For example, you can write an Oozie script that will scrape your production HBase data to a Hive warehouse nightly, then a Mahout script will train with this data. At the same time, you might use pig to pull in the test set into another file and when Mahout is done creating a model you can pass the testing data through the model and get results. You specify the dependency graph of these tasks through Oozie (I may be messing up terminology since I've never used Oozie but have used the Facebook equivalent).

Rethinking The Four Faces of Competitive Intelligence
For many of us who are involved with competitive intelligence for a living, our thinking has evolved beyond this traditional matrix. Lessons learned along the way—combined with new technological capabilities in Big Data—have persuaded us that the above traditional approach doesn’t accurately represent the optimal four faces of Competitive Intelligence. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult (and expensive) to contract for exact metrics at a deep detail level. ... CI is a mix of empirical learning and intuitive leaps, but it can be systematic. Our four faces of CI relate to where data resources are found and how they are collected and stored. This alternate focus reframes the questions and practices that are most logical to pursue.

EU privacy ruling should apply globally, says digital chief
The decision in question was made last year by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s highest court, in a case involving a Spanish man who wanted to remove from Google’s results an old news article about his long-ago debt problems. The CJEU’s decision set a new precedent by saying EU data protection law, which allows people to request the erasure of out-of-date information about themselves in limited circumstances, applied to search engines. The question of how far its implementation should extend touches on a fundamental conundrum about the internet — countries need to be able to apply their laws online as they do offline, but the onlne layer’s lack of inherent borders makes that difficult to do effectively.

How I Landed My CIO Dream Job
Yes. I learned all that I possibly could about the company. I started by actually reading the annual report and was surprised by how helpful that was. I found people who worked there, I reached out to them and invited them to have lunch – people I did not know at all. In retrospect, that was a good move - very eye opening about the culture at the firm and how people did their work.I also contacted the former CEO of my last employer and met him for lunch, which was another really good move. He is a smart executive with a lot of experience in manufacturing, so I asked him what he thought about this company and their market space, the job opportunity, and how to interview for it. He gave me some invaluable perspective and advice.

U.S. Department of Defense sets its cloud security guidelines
this long-awaited guide has provided some clarification around DOD’s expectations from Integrators, CSPs, and DOD mission owners. The DOD has clearly laid out for Integrators and CSPs the expectations for inclusion into the DISA Cloud Service Catalog. It will be interesting to see how and if the definition of a prime CSP evolves and how the industry and government alike adapt to that distinction. My initial reaction to the SRG is that it limits the playing field of prime CSPs that are able to comply with these requirements today. For small integrators trying to migrate applications to the cloud on behalf of the federal government, it makes the proposition riskier.

Platforms, not products, are the way to bring financial services to the poor
In the West, where advanced credit rating systems already crawl every financial transaction, this would seem a needless intrusion. But Lenddo operates in countries where only a small proportion of the population spends money in ways that are visible to credit ratings agencies, says Arjuna Costa of the Omidyar Network, a venture capital firm focused on social enterprise and which funds Lenddo. For the rest, their social media activity, combined with other sources signals such as financial performance over time, can make for a pretty good proxy. ... Lenddo targets the so-called “emerging class”—people who work at call centers in Asia, for instance. These are people who live well above the poverty line, but who nonetheless have precarious financial lives.

Quote for the day:

“Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” -- St. Francis of Assisi

February 11, 2015

The Future of Value Generation - Value Propositions Where People and Planet Matter
In executing any profound transformational strategies or implementing change programmes, before we can introduce new business models we require a systems view of the organisation. However, this systems view can not be mechanistic or Cartesian, since any attempt to introduce the new business model (and value proposition) will still be articulated and understood using the old logic, and therefore are likely to fail. ... What Value Proposition Design has done is to provide a new level of granularity, allowing people to now zoom in and out of their conceptualisations of value, in a way in which is now truly powerful and beneficial.

Data Center Building vs. Outsourcing: What’s Best For Your Business
For companies in need of a large deployment of cabinets, with the resources easily available and, according to Schneider Electric, a data center life expectancy of more than five years, it may make sense in the long term to build an in-house data center. For smaller to midsize companies and startups, the evidence points toward outsourcing data center needs. The bottom line is that no matter the size of a company, it is no longer viable to ignore the importance of having a reliable data center. So whether it is a large company with extensive financial resources or a smaller company, let the numbers and evidence guide the decision to determine whether to build or lease a data center.

Learn to Crunch Big Data with R
After exploring many options, I chose to implement this piece in R, taking advantage of the wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering) and graphical techniques implemented in the R system. One of the attractions for me was the R scripting language, which makes it easy to save and rerun analyses on updated data sets; another attraction was the ability to integrate R and C++. A key benefit for this project was the fact that R, unlike Excel and other GUI analysis programs, is completely auditable.

Want To Go Digital? Fix IT Fundamentals First
Quick wins, and bringing mission, purpose, and accountability to IT are two important fundamentals. But another fundamental to good IT is making business units accountable as well. They, too, are sometimes part of the technology problem. Caudill's first business accountability mechanism was to implement activity based costing, where every IT request has a price, and is either reported or even charged back to business units. This practice makes sure that service users understand the financial, not just operational, impacts of their decisions. He said this practice was a significant component of his digital IT transformation.

Do Enterprises Really Need a BYOD Policy?
The most challenging adjustment for CIOs adapting to the BYOD trend is the need for better systems to authenticate network users, essentially all who access corporate systems with their own personal mobile devices. The IT infrastructure to support BYOD has developed, but there are a few kinks to iron out in terms of policies and guidelines. According to Khilnani of BlackBerry, “Organisations deploying BYOD policies are exploring new grounds in the consumerisation of IT. They look to improve the productivity of the staff and also believe that costs will reduce drastically as employees will require less technical training if they use the same machines at home and at work.”

The problem with cloud service providers and security SLAs
In recent discussions with several professional service providers including ViON (a Washington-based systems integrator), BRUNS-PAK (a data center deployment firm), Google (the search engine/cloud services provider), as well as conversations with former employees of professional services firms, I have developed some interesting new insights – particularly with respect to cloud security. I’m finding that these firms and individuals possess a wealth of information on industry trends – as well as deep insights into why information technology (IT) buyers are making certain decisions while discarding other ideas.

How infosec hiring lost its way: Harsh findings in Leviathan report
The report -- real name "Analysis of Cloud vs. Local Storage: Capabilities, Opportunities, Challenges" -- concisely explains the solutions coming from the establishment classes: Basically, it's either poach talent from other countries, or make everyone go to college, get degrees, and hire them in five years after they have experience. "The first category of solutions," Leviathan diagrams, "to a country that has a shortage in qualified security workers involve finding expert security workers in other countries, and bringing them (on either a temporary, as-needed, basis, or on a permanent one) to the country with the shortage."

The Redefined No of the CFO
You are no longer seen primarily as a wielder of the sharp pencil, someone who holds the line on expenses to protect a tight bottom line. Instead, you are the voice of focused investment, asking the right questions and providing the right insights so that everyone understands when to say no and how to say yes. You help the company turn down many activities so that the few most important can thrive. The deciding factor is strategic value. Economies of scale and market clout are no longer the formidable barriers to entry they once were. The allocation of resources must now favor a company’s most distinctive capabilities—those differentiating things it does particularly well that enable it to outperform competitors over time.

Understanding the Business Benefits of Colocation
A colocation solution provides companies with a variety of opportunities, with exceptional SLAs and having data secured off-site, providing organizations with added levels of risk management and the chance to invest in better equipment and state-of-the-art servers. This can enable IT teams the possibility to explore options such as virtualization and condense the amount of racks and servers required. Colocation providers are able to meet business requirements at a lower cost than if the service was kept in-house. Data centers and colocation providers have the ability to have businesses up and running within hours, as well as provide the flexibility to grow alongside your organization.

HP predicts major cyber attack in next five years
HP also predicts enormous challenges around creating a robust single digital online identity and managing the security of information shared online through social media, in the cloud and through devices connected to the internet of things. “All these things are all about sharing data, not about security. Securing all the data shared in this way is a huge challenge in the absence of any standards to enable us to take control,” said Kawalec. Another significant challenge in the next five years, he said, will be ensuring that regulatory and privacy concerns are addressed without limiting cross-border trade or exposing industry to financial risk.

Quote for the day:

"All that we are is the result of all that we have thought." -- Buddha

February 10, 2015

A glimpse into the future of money
Mobile may offer ways to improve customer service at the front end, but banks are also overhauling their back-end systems too. "The most visible results of banking's digital revolution are mobile apps and systems for managing customer relationships over social networks, as well as new ways of providing a digital signature [such as Touch ID]. But there still needs to be a major effort before we'll see the most transformative part of the revolution, which has to allow banks to become what new digital customers expect us to be," Banc de Sabadell's CTO Carlos Abarca says.

Why Cisco is Warming to Non-ACI Data Center SDN
“This is an interesting move by Cisco in that [the open protocol-based overlay technology] is a difference from their ACI stack,” Mike Marcellin, senior vice president of strategy and marketing at Cisco rival Juniper Networks, said. “Cisco is acknowledging that ACI is not for everybody, and [that] they need to think a little more broadly.” ... EVPN is a protocol generally used to connect multiple data centers over Wide Area Networks. It enables a service provider to create multiple virtual connections between sites for a number of customers over a single physical network while keeping each customer’s traffic private.

BIG Data, Medical Imaging and Machine Intelligence
More and more users, and more and more machines generate more unstructured data on a daily basis. Capturing the essence of such massive flow of data is beyond traditional computation facilities and their classical methodologies. Large data centres and intelligent algorithms, embedded within capable and flexible distributed computing environments such as Hadoop, are necessary to make sense of big data. One of the major fields “suffering” from big data, which has been widely neglected so far, is medical imaging. More than approximately two trillion medical images are captured worldwide each year. A large number of these images have to be stored for several years. There is a huge amount of information contained in these images and their annotations.

Xamarin's Jonathan Pryor on Android 5 Lollipop
Lollipop seems to incorporate a lot of features first developed by Motorola such as "Tap and Go" which came from Motorola Connect, "Ambient Display" which came from Motorola's most popular feature on the Moto X, "Active Display" and another cool security feature Motorola provided for their devices is now present, providing for "trusted" device connections. This allows you to associate your phone with another "trusted" device either through Bluetooth or NFC, so that you can unlock your device and actually set it to "not lock" when around this "trusted" device.

The Type of Data Scientists We Need
Data Scientists can get an understanding of the business need and then work to understand the data with the proper algorithms, and tools to provide what is needed by the business user to get value from Big Data. So a Data Scientist needs not only to have a strong analytical, statistical mathematical background, but they also need to have and gain specific industry understanding and expertise. They need not only to understand the mechanics, they need to work with industry experts and understand what the users do and need in order to deliver it. Building that industry relationship and expertise is key.

There’s No Such Thing as Anonymous Data
In a paper published in Science last week, MIT scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye shows that anonymous credit card data can be reverse engineered to identify individuals’ transactions, a finding which calls into question many of the policies developed to protect consumers and forces data scientists to reconsider the policies and ethics that guide how they use large datasets. ... To be clear: Reidentification means that the researchers could identify all the transactions that belong to an individual, but de Montjoye didn’t attempt to say which individual. For example, if he wanted to know my transactions, he’d need to take additional steps to cross reference something he knew about me to his data. If, for example,

Containers Get Ready To Run Critical Production Apps
Docker containers are a natural formatting and organizing agent for some existing applications and many future ones. The more we decompose enterprise applications into smaller and smaller pieces, or micro-services, the more useful they become. Think of each service in a big, monolithic application separated and running in its own container. Before such an approach takes hold, IT has many management issues to work out. How will one service be linked to another? How will they be monitored and tracked after launch? Who's driving the use of containers? Right now, it is primarily developers and testing teams, which both like the fast and lightweight code deployments that containers allow.

How attackers' sights have switched to the tech-savvy
Along with data scientists - and security researchers themselves - systems admins are increasingly a target because of the way their privileged access combines with a need to try out new tools. "Systems administrators, who often experiment with new types of software, are partially predictable. You can guess what sorts of media they consume and the websites they go to and the types of software they download. Targeting them is something you're going to see a lot more of," Palmer said. As well as specifically targeting such individuals, attackers are also employing malvertising, where legitimate online advertising networks and webpages are poisoned with malware-bearing adverts.

Unlikely partners? The CCO and the CTO
The IT head should be a cybersecurity-minded CCO’s best friend. Don’t know them yet? Remedy that today. You should be in constant conversation with your IT head, so that you can continually refine your organization’s cybersecurity mechanisms and communicate regularly with your employees around critical risks. You might collaboratively develop password management policies, choose firewall and encryption settings, and review vulnerability scans. You might also leverage the IT head’s technical knowledge to learn about the types of cyber events that threaten your organization. The 2014 iteration of Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations

Protect yourself from hackers and the NSA
One unfortunate fact makes email and other messaging apps especially vulnerable to snoops -- you can't control it because it also resides elsewhere. People focus on Sony employees whose emails were compromised. But what about the people outside Sony they corresponded with? Their communication with Sony employees got compromised, too. The truth is that even if you have an aggressive purge policy that calls for deleting email after a certain amount of time, there will probably still be copies of the deleted messages with people outside the company.

Quote for the day:

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage

February 09, 2015

Banking industry is finally ripe for digital disruption
We are seeing the emergence of new, challenger banks based on digital technology, which do not suffer from the complex, legacy IT that the incumbents depend on. Also, banks find some of their services being cherry-picked by the new tech giants - payment services such as Apple Pay, for example, not to mention Paypal. Research suggests more of us will use smartphones to pay for things than credit or debit cards by 2020. Some banks are responding, of course. Barclays is pushing hard on new mobile services, and even providing training in branches for children to learn coding. Santander is going further, and taking on the cloud suppliers at their own game, offering cloud storage to corporate clients.

What Are Legacy IT Systems Costing You?
“Old systems and these legacy systems can slow down government, and it takes a lot of time and money to keep them updated,” Hudgins told KING 5. Rough estimates show that replacing all legacy systems could cost between $568 million and $2.8 billion, according to a November 2014 report to the state Legislature. Modernizing the state’s 343 mission-critical legacy IT systems alone is projected to cost $485 million to $2.4 billion. The state’s classification of legacy systems is about more than age or the programming language used to write software code. Washington state’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) also considers whether a system can be easily updated, if there are adequate staff to support the system and whether the system poses security risks or made businesses processes more complex.

The Future of Commodity Systems in the Data Center
We’re at a very interesting point in time during the cloud infrastructure era. The modern data center continues to evolve from physical to virtual, numerous management stacks being abstracted into the logical, or virtual, layer. Is another data center evolution around the corner? Will new kinds of compute platforms allow for a more open data center model? We’ve already begun to see a shift in the way data centers provide services. A new kind of commodity architecture is making its way into the consumer, cloud provider, and even service provider data center.

Dependencies, Scrum of Scrums, and SAFe
That said, there’s no doubt in my mind that when the program-level people allocate plan components to teams, they’ll inject many more dependencies than are necessary, because they just can’t really know what the teams can do. In addition, many organizations have strange silos of specialization, and these cause dependencies that are often unnecessary. One example of that is the Database Administrator (DBA) function that many organizations have. No changes can be made to the company’s databases unless the DBA people approve. This can take ages, and if your DBAs are anything like the ones I’ve dealt with, some of them are really uncooperative bullies. Others, of course, are a delight to work with.

7 Workforce Management Trends That Will Impact IT in 2015
With 2015 well underway, it's time to start developing your workforce management strategies and plans for the coming year. We asked two experts in workforce management, The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated and Robert Half Technology's Executive Director John Reed to discuss the biggest issues that will impact workforce management in 2015. From the effect minimum wage laws will have on your business to an IT hiring boom, here's what to expect.

Samsung SmartTV eavesdropping flap overblown
Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition. If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands.

Flash in the Data Center: Solid-state Drives For Enterprise Workloads
Flash enables and accelerates key data-center initiatives in database, analytics, cloud computing, and virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI)—all of them workloads requiring high performance and low latency. Today, vendors are addressing IT’s historical concerns about the cost and reliability of flash, but the changing economics of flash-enabled computing are still not widely known. Although individual SSDs still cost more than hard-disk drives (HDDs), the increase in IT efficiency reduces the overall operational cost of deployment and maintenance. In this environment, the decision to implement flash-enabled workloads rests on greater awareness of the impact that flash storage has on workload performance, IT efficiency, and operational costs.

What Is Your Next Big Thing In Technology And Innovation
The million dollar question, I wish I knew the answer to this one. The Internet has revolutionized the world in a way that only a handful of creations and collaborations has. What will be the products, ideas or services that will have an impact on the future and will change our lives? I’ve mentioned a few possibilities in this post. These are all promising, but my pick for what it will be? Decision Engineering, better decisions with the help of Big Data. I invite you to share your bold ideas. Aren’t we all supposed to have flying cars like the Jetsons by now?

Insights into the Testing and Release Processes for Chrome for iOS
Generally, there are a certain number of cases where a manual test is the only way forward, e.g., with specific types of users that have some rate limit, so tests cannot be executed too fast; or special enterprise account types that put restrictions on actions, etc. But manual testing is also used when no test cases have been automated yet for a given feature. This may happen with the introduction of new features, which get approved and enter the development process late. Sometimes, indeed, they get through the whole milestone without any automated tests having been written. Finally, there can also be features for which it is simply deemed not necessary to have automated tests, like the Chrome tab switcher feature.

Chief Innovation Officers: Do They Deliver?
What innovation officers really need, Goldsmith said, is the imprimatur of the governor or mayor to challenge the status quo up and down the bureaucratic ranks–even if it means stepping on some toes. “You need someone in the executive office – the governor or the mayor – to take on entrenched interests: the bureaucracy, the vendors, or labor, and chart a path to a better solution,” Goldsmith said. Tapping someone from outside government often works best. Some states and cities have created “entrepreneurs in residence” programs to attract successful people from the private sector willing to devote their time and creative juices to public service.

Quote for the day:

"Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” -- Peter F. Drucker