Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 21, 2015

IoT and smart devices need ethical programmers, says Gartner
At Level 3, Evolutionary Ethical Programming, tech companies would need to introduce ethical programming as part of a connected device that learns and evolves, because the more a smart device does learn, the more it departs from its original design. Here the user would maintain overall control, but the smart device would have some degree of autonomy. How future devices are trusted by users will become key at this level, said Gartner. For example, if a smartphone app is not trusted to report your business expenses accurately, or if an autonomous car was not trusted to safely navigate a dangerous stretch of road, the user would be able to take back control.

Goodbye, Internet Explorer
The changes both to the browser and the branding make a lot of sense. Internet Explorer, first released in the mid-1990s, dominated the browser market at its peak in the early 2000s, but it came to be associated with poor security and compatibility with other browsers and has since languished. Spartan’s success is critical if Microsoft is to remain relevant in the Web browser business—a market in which it used to dominate but now trails Google’s Chrome. According to data from StatCounter, in February, Chrome had 43.2 percent of the global browser market (including desktop, mobile, and other platforms), while Internet Explorer captured 13.1 percent and Firefox had 11.6 percent.

Artificial Intelligence Is Almost Ready for Business
The biggest application of Watson has been in health care. Watson excels in situations where you need to bridge between massive amounts of dynamic and complex text information (such as the constantly changing body of medical literature) and another mass of dynamic and complex text information (such as patient records or genomic data), to generate and evaluate hypotheses. With training, Watson can provide recommendations for treatments for specific patients. Many prestigious academic medical centers, such as The Cleveland Clinic, The Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are working with IBM to develop systems that will help healthcare providers better understand patients’ diseases and recommend personalized courses of treatment.

Premera, Anthem data breaches linked by similar hacking tactics
One of Deep Panda’s attack methods is to create fake websites that imitate corporate services for companies. In Anthem’s case, the attackers set up several subdomains based on “we11point.com,” which were designed to mimic real services such as human resources, a VPN and a Citrix server. By targeting Anthem employees with phishing emails and luring them to the fake sites, it may have been possible for the attackers to collect the logins and passwords and eventually access the insurer’s real systems. ThreatConnect, an Arlington, Virginia-based security company, found that Premera appears to have been targeted by the same style of attack.

Facebook releases open source ORC reader for Presto
"The level of SQL functionality that's implemented in Presto I think is unprecedented in the Hadoop world," Navruzyan says. "They decoupled the distributed SQL query engine from the underlying data store. This was a really great design decision." ... "We are always pushing the envelope in terms of scale and performance," writes Dain Sundstrom, a Facebook software engineer and creator of Presto. "We have a large number of internal users at Facebook who use Presto on a continuous basis for data analysis. Improving query performance directly improves their productivity, so we thought through ways to make Presto even faster. We ended up focusing on a few elements that could help deliver optimal performance in the Presto query engine."

Agile and Enterprise Architecture
“The real value of enterprise architecture is not in making better architectures…it’s in making a better enterprise” Gary Doucet, Chief Architect, Government of Canada Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat GC. How does enterprise architecture support agile that seems to focus on “light” processes? Are the two concepts in conflict with one another? In my view they complement one another ... True agility enables teams to have access to accurate as-is content as modeled artifacts and to move towards to-be artifacts in a collaborative managed environment. This implies that models are not only used in projects, but also in daily operations i.e. managing change requests and service requests.

Latest Dridex Campaign Evades Detection with AutoClose Function
“The user is enticed to enable macros and open the attachment, and when they open it, they see a blank page and, under the hood, nothing bad happens,” said a Proofpoint advisory. “Instead, the malicious action occurs when the document is closed. The macro payload, in this case, listens for a document close event, and when that happens, the macro executes.” The use of this type of VBscript function, Proofpoint said, is effective against sandbox detection capabilities. Malware that delays execution isn’t necessarily a new evasion tactic, but attackers have been getting innovative about side-stepping security protections in place. For example, sandboxes and intrusion detection software became wise to short delays in execution times. By executing only when the document closes, this current string of Dridex seems to have taken the next step.

Virtual Reality Advertisements Get in Your Face
The huge value of the online advertising market suggests it could be lucrative to experiment in this area. According to Magna Global, a media market researcher and investor, digital media revenue rose 17 percent in 2014 to $142 billion. It’s expected to climb another 15 percent to $163 billion globally this year. Dallas-based Airvirtise certainly hopes advertisers will be willing to try to reach people inside virtual scenes. It’s working on virtual 3-D models that are integrated with real-world locations, which it discerns from longitude, latitude, and elevation—think a giant Angry Birds game in a park or a life-size virtual car you can walk around.

Web Application Firewalls - Enterprise Techniques
WAFs compare requests to generic attack signatures and application specific policies for the web application being protected and alert or block violations. A WAF can follow a positive or negative security model to develop security policies for an applicatin. ... The negative security model is acchieved by compiling a list of attack signatures, comparing web traffic against those signatures blocking the traffic that matches. Blocking only what is known as bad is considered the more functional approach in business perspective. ... negative security model does not provide protection against unknown attacks.

Public sector slow to pick up on the internet of things, says Gartner
"The majority of IoT spending for smart cities will come from the private sector. This is good news for technology service providers (TSPs) as the private sector has shorter and more succinct procurement cycles than public sectors and cities," said Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Gartner research vice-president. Tratz-Ryan urged technology companies to plan, engage and position their offerings now, or risk missing out on the money-spinning opportunities. “We expect commercial IoT implementations to be used across multiple industries, such as smart energy, environmental service or journey planning, which will offer TSPs the opportunity to monetise IoT by building IoT-related service models," said Tratz-Ryan.

Quote for the day:

"The measure of success isn't if you have a tough problem, but whether it's the same one you had last year." -- J.F. Dulles

March 20, 2015

Tech Startups Weigh The Merits Of Austin Vs. Silicon Valley
It’s a far different story in Texas, where land is still cheap. The average price of a home in Austin is just $310,187. And with few land-use and zoning restrictions, homebuilders keep adding to the supply of homes, which keeps prices in check. “Our head scientist moved his whole family here from Cambridge, England,” says Murphy. “He could move here and get a house with a pool. I don’t think we could have gotten him to move to San Francisco.” Murphy was also worried about hiring and retaining top-notch employees in the Bay Area. With plenty of job openings for talented engineers and developers, the fight for good workers has created a kind of “revolving door”mentality among employees.

Transforming an Analog Company into a Digital Company: The Case of BBVA
The issue is not limited to handling an increasing volume of transactions and customer interactions. It crucially hinges on the huge amount of data collected in the course of customer contact, combined with the immense and rapidly increasing volume of information available on the internet, largely supplied by people’s social media activity and devices within the “Internet of Things.” We must capture, store and accurately process all that information to generate the knowledge to offer customers the best possible experience, even anticipating their needs and supporting them throughout their decision-making process. This is what I call “knowledge-driven banking,”

curl, 17 years old today
We’ve hosted parts of our project on servers run by the various companies I’ve worked for and we’ve been on and off various free services. Things come and go. Virtually nothing stays the same so we better just move with the rest of the world. These days we’re on github a lot. Who knows how long that will last… We have grown to support a ridiculous amount of protocols and curl can be built to run on virtually every modern operating system and CPU architecture. The list of helpful souls who have contributed to make curl into what it is now have grown at a steady pace all through the years and it now holds more than 1200 names.

The Increasing Cybersecurity Attack Surface
CISOs need to think about new security requirements based upon an old cybersecurity concept, the “attack surface.” In other words, the entire expanding internal and external IT infrastructure should be viewed as a holistic attack surface and addressed accordingly. So risks should be assessed across the complete attack surface while risk mitigation should include central policy management and security controls for distributed policy enforcement that cover the whole attack surface enchilada. This is critical because multi-dimensional threats will pivot from partner IT infrastructure to endpoint devices, to networks, to cloud-based sensitive data so policies and controls must cover the attack surface and the kill chain.

Making Your Own Servers Wasn’t Always Sexy
To be sure, Rackspace-designed Open Compute servers are not the only kind of hardware running in the company’s data centers. They support its public cloud and bare-metal services. Many of its other more traditional services (things like VMware virtual machines) run on traditional enterprise infrastructure. One reason is the legacy of cross-certification among incumbent vendors. If you want EMC, Oracle, and Cisco to cooperate with each other in supporting an enterprise IT environment running in your data center, that environment better consist of components the vendors have certified to work together.

Enterprise Architecture and Systems Thinking – by Ian Glossop
The pattern of interactions within the system, or between the system and its environment, may endure over time – which leads to ideas of structure in and between systems. Or the interactions between components and systems may involve the fairly rapid movement of material, energy or information – which leads to ideas about system dynamics. Hence the very simple, general notion of a “system”, with a proper definition, bootstraps or kickstarts a whole theoretical framework for looking at the world – or bits of the world labelled as “enterprises”. One key observation from this way or looking at the world: the real-world is full of thousands or millions of different systems and individual parts may be components in many systems concurrently.

Keep your Head in the Cloud!
No matter how non-IT-oriented you are, the word “cloud” has definitely reached your life, especially if you’ve got a share in business. Cloud services became an important tool for reaching such business goals ... Today, cloud vendors provide a wide range of services which are supposed to significantly save costs and provide unparalleled business value. However, how true is that? How to choose a right cloud vendor that really meets your business needs and won’t leave decision makers disillusioned? Having clearly defined your company’s business goals, here are the most crucial factors for you to consider while choosing a cloud provider.

The evolving shape of distributed databases in the Internet of Things
At heart, a database remains an organized collection of data that represents a state of affairs in the subject domain as implemented through a consistent schematic model. Another way of expressing this is the notion that a database is a “global, shared, mutable state,” as discussed in this thought-provoking recent post by Martin Kleppmann. ... Most of these fundamentals haven’t changed in the intervening decades, though NoSQL databases with their emphasis on “eventually consistency” have pushed the transactionality bar into looser, less ACID-ic territory. With that in mind, I took great interest in Kleppmann’s discussion of “turning the database inside-out,” specifically with regard to his vision of the evolving database as an “always-growing collection of immutable facts.”

Is it time for CIOs to step up and rule the digital world?
Companies can't wait any longer, so perhaps it's time for a new kind of quarterback. Nearly three out of four brands either have a chief customer experience officer or plan to hire one this year, says IDC. By 2020, IDC predicts 60 percent of CIOs at global organizations will be supplanted by chief digital officers. In the Harvard Business Review, Scott Brinker says chief marketing technologists will become the connective tissue between marketing and IT. "If you don't have a [chief data officer], you've turned the kids loose on the playground of data, and they're going to do whatever they want," Dorman Bazzell, practice leader at Capgemini, told Computerworld. "There is going to have to be a role that manages all of the use of that data."

What startups can teach CIOs about IT funding
One approach CIOs can take is to ask their CEOs and CFOs the following question: "Is there anything that we're going to be doing at scale that doesn'tinvolve information technology?" The answer these days is almost certainly 'No,' she said, but it is still the CIO's responsibility to make the case why any project of scale will be better if it involves information technology. Pull out the IT project portfolio and make the CEO and CFO see how IT projects and initiatives are supporting their business strategy. However, simply spewing out IT project after IT project isn't enough, especially when it comes to convincing the CFO that IT is worth investing more money in. The case must be made about how these projects will pay off.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together." -- Jesse Jackson

March 19, 2015

How CIOs Become Hybrid Cloud Heroes
It is nearly impossible for the CIO to know exactly what the company will need six, 12 or 18 months from now, but budgets need to be set anyway. Beyond mission-critical operations that are easier to predict, things can change quickly and without much notice. This forces the CIO to keep a safety buffer within his budget to take care of those surprises. In growth years, it is wise to use an even higher buffer, as the company is likely to experience a lot of unpredictability. However, at times when budgets shrink and only must-have projects get funded, projects that cannot be easily explained get left out of the budget, which can stall innovation and growth.

Cyberlegs project wants to equip amputees with robotic limbs
Cyberlegs is a joint project by a number of European institutions: the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa, Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus in Florence, as well the Catholic University of Louvain and the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. Researchers from these schools have been working on the project since 2012 using $2.7 million in funds from the European Commission, but the Italian scientists have only just presented their work to the public this Monday. Thus far, the system has already been tested by 11 people. But when the team got together recently to assess their work, they've determined that they still need to reduce the prosthetic's weight and size for comfort.

Multi-cloud doesn't have to mean cloud chaos
The first step could be to adopt an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud model. By leaving your provider with the more routine tasks, such as hardware, data and server management, businesses can become empowered to focus on innovating and add value to the organisation. What’s more, the benefits of IaaS – including improved security and efficiency, reduced costs, and optimised insights – closely align with IT departments’ modern IT objectives. Although most businesses have a clear understanding of IaaS’ advantages, research revealed that over half are yet to implement it due to concerns around relinquishing control of IT environments.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Vulnerability Management Program
Over the years there has been lots of discussion and points of view surrounding security metrics and how to measure the effectiveness of a vulnerability management program. In fact, the Center for Security has even laid out a framework for security metrics developed by an expert panel in an effort to help organizations determine and validate security strategies. In 2004 Qualys first began anonymously using the accumulated vulnerability scan data received from its customers to identify key, quantifiable attributes or metrics to help companies drive strategies for protecting networks, systems and data. These metrics have become known as the “Laws of Vulnerabilities” and are comprised of the following four key measures:

10 portable keyboards for iPhone, iPad, and Android
Unlike some of us, you probably don't set out with your iPhone or Android phone as your only computer. You've got a laptop and perhaps a tablet for getting work done. Even so, sometimes the phone is all you've got with you when the need to write a detailed email or work on a document. That can be a challenge tapping on the little keyboard on the screen. There are quite a few portable keyboards available that can step in when you need to do a lot of writing. Free time with the iPhone or Android phone can turn into unexpected productive time with the right accessory.

CIOs Share Lessons Learned From the Journey to the Cloud
"Ten percent to 20 percent of my staff are not embracing the cloud concept because they feel it's going to put them out of a job," he says. "I wish they would embrace the cloud more. You've got to align your staff with your strategic goals. All our new hires are being hired with that in mind. I don't need anyone to manage physical assets anymore." Patti notes that AccuWeather now tries to do as many educational internal sessions as it can to show his IT staff what the company has done cloud-wise. In fact, Patti now considers cloud the default option for any project. His people need a solid justification for doing something on-premise. "I challenge them to pick something they're doing now and figure out how to do it with the cloud," he says.

Wearables And Other Gadgets Aim To Finally Kill Off The Password
The fingerprint-sensing technology inside the iPhone and the latest Samsung handsets is a marked improvement over a PIN code or a password. They are, however, not perfect: With enough time and effort, fingerprints can be spoofed or fooled. (We leave them everywhere we go, after all.) They're also impossible to change once an account has been compromised. In its current state, such technology works best as a second layer of protection alongside other security measures. To spoof a fingerprint on an iPhone 6 "requires skill, patience, and a really good copy of someone's fingerprint," but it can be done, writes Marc Rogers from the Lookout security firm.

Methods for De-identification of Protected Health Information
The Privacy Rule was designed to protect individually identifiable health information through permitting only certain uses and disclosures of PHI provided by the Rule, or as authorized by the individual subject of the information. However, in recognition of the potential utility of health information even when it is not individually identifiable, §164.502(d) of the Privacy Rule permits a covered entity or its business associate to create information that is not individually identifiable by following the de-identification standard and implementation specifications in §164.514(a)-(b). These provisions allow the entity to use and disclose information that neither identifies nor provides a reasonable basis to identify an individual

Health records are the new credit cards
“Cyber criminals are now going after health care records because they hold up to ten times more value on the black market over simple credit card numbers," said Carl Wright, general manager at San Mateo, Calif.-based TrapX. Electronic health record information can be used for billing scams that go as high as the value of the health insurance policy, to purchase prescription drugs for resale on the black market, and also for run-of-the-mill identity theft. In addition, recent changes in the health industry mean that many formerly offline, disparate health data sources are now being brought together, said Ivan Shefrin, vice president of security solutions at Cupertino, Calif.-based TaaSera, Inc. "And attackers are carefully studying and exploiting weak spots in new, vast connectivity," he added.

Interview: Building the 'world's greenest datacentre' in Falun, Sweden
Behind the venture is energy utility Falu Energi & Vatten in collaboration with datacentre entrepreneurs EcoDC. “Other players are also starting to look at re-using the energy in district heating systems, but we are the first to utilise it all the way in EcoDataCenter. Apple says they will do it in Denmark in the future, while customers are moving in to our datacentre at the beginning of 2016,” says Jan Fahlén, business developer for datacentres at Falu Energi & Vatten. “This might seem like an obvious thing to do, but the reason others aren’t doing it is that it requires a very strong collaboration with the local energy company,” says Fahlén.

Quote for the day:

"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is." -- Scott Cook

March 17, 2015

Facebook Makes Open Source Networking a Reality
The Six Pack is not currently running in Facebook data centers at scale. The new switches are being tested in production in several parts of the infrastructure, Ahmad said. The Facebook network switch that is already running at scale is the top-of-rack switch called Wedge, which the company announced in June of last year. At this month’s summit in San Jose, Facebook said it would contribute the Wedge spec to OCP as well. Not only will the spec be available, but there’s also already a vendor that will sell Wedge switches. They will be available from the Taiwanese network equipment maker Accton Technology and its channel partners.

Analysis Paralysis: How “Big Data” May Finally Spell the End of Make-Believe Numbers
Financial modelling certainly has added value to many businesses and does appear to provide a degree of vigor to the process of making business decisions. However, I would argue that there is something amiss in our unquestioning faith in financial models. There is something foul in our Fourier transforms; something putrid in our pivot tables; something decrepit in our depreciation schedules. For all of our reliance upon financial modeling in business, the vast majority of the “facts” that we use in feeding these beasts are absolute rubbish. Our estimates are complete fabrications, our assumptions are myths, our calculations are artifacts of our innate need to categorise and comprehend things that may be neither categorical nor comprehensible.

US firms caught in Chinese censorship crossfire
While cloud services provided by US companies can cloak banned website access -- such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and news publications -- it holds risk for the firms themselves. These companies are being forced to walk a fine line as the censorship row escalates, and the unauthorized use of tunnels, VPNs and signing up for free accounts in order to link to blocked websites could land them in hot water as activists are breaking local laws. Generally, the circumvention takes place without the consent of cloud providers. However, to stop this practice, Chinese authorities would need to block full servers -- which would disrupt countless businesses, including thousands of Chinese SMBs, activists say.

Prepare for The Cyber Threat : What Executives Need to Know to Manage Risk
The history of cyber incidents has made this observation very clear: at some point adversaries will get in. And after you mitigate the last attack at some point they will get in again. CEOs asking this question should take this as an opportunity to evaluate and develop the incident response plan that their organization has developed. A comprehensive incident response plan should outline the steps to take if a data breach is suspected or occurs. Having a detailed and tested plan in place prior to a breach occurring will save time and money, and minimize reputational damage when the inevitable happens.

IT Service Management is not Dead – ITSM in an Outsourced World
The commoditization of IT services in the form of multiple ‘as-a-service’ offerings began over a decade ago and will continue to expand with a new ‘aaS’ acronym seeming to appear almost daily at times. As this trend began ITSM specialists globally wondered what this was going to mean for their profession. Would service management move to being something only practiced by cloud vendors? Would the in-house IT department and service desk become a dinosaur and just a distant memory. These fears have not been realized and ITSM is just as relevant as ever, if not more so, but the way we practice it has changed and will continue to do so as the way our IT services are delivered to the business continues to develop and move to a more commodity-based model.

Beyond Join-Move-Leave with IGA Identity Life Cycles
Identity life cycle is so foundational to identity governance and administration that one would expect, after all these years, that IGA solutions would provide good support for real-world business scenarios. Shockingly, that is not what we found during our critical capabilities research. Many IGA vendors still seem to assume that most organizations have a single authoritative source for identity data and that only a single identity life cycle is required. If that is the case for your organization, then you are lucky. In reality, most organizations have multiple identity life cycles and gaps (and even overlaps) in authoritative sources. Some identity life cycle requirements, such as contractor management, are so pervasive that it seems almost capricious that IGA products provide so little direct support.

Security Breaches, Data Loss, Outages: The Bad Side of Cloud
For now, cloud computing has really done a good job staying out of the spotlight when it comes to major security issues. Yes, Dropbox might accidentally delete a few of your files, or some source code becomes exposed. But the reality is that a public cloud environment hasn’t really ever experience amassive data breach. Ask yourself this question, what would happen if AWS lost 80 million records like in the very recent Anthem breach? The conversation around public cloud security would certainly shift quickly. But the reality is that they haven’t. Maybe this gives us more hope that the cloud architecture is being designed in such a way that data is properly segregated, networks are well designed, and the proper boarder security technologies are in place.

Not all data breaches are created equal – do you know the difference?
Personally Identifiable Information, also known as PII, is a more serious form of data breach, as those affected are impacted far beyond the scope of a replaceable credit card. PII is information that identifies an individual, such as name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number, or Social Security number, and is exactly what cyber criminals need to commit identity theft. Lines of credit can be opened, tax refunds redirected, Social Security claims filed – essentially, the possibilities of criminal activities are endless, much like the headache of the one whose information has been breached. Unlike credit cards, which can be deactivated and the customer reimbursed, one’s identity cannot be changed or begun anew.

Cyberdefense in the Era of Advanced Persistent Threats
Security best practices dictate that end users not run as administrators or even be given administrative rights on their own machines.4 Malware often gets on end-user machines by exploiting the end user through well-thought-out socialengineering tactics. Common ploys include asking the end user to click on a link, open a document, or directly install a program. Nothing can totally prevent end users from falling for these tactics. This ultimately means that, for computers and networks to stay malware free, every new piece of code that needs to run on a machine must be trusted or examined by someone who can determine its legitimacy. This idea tends to frighten most people in the industry, but it’s the most effective way to keep malware out of networks.

Why Bankers Are Leaving Finance for No-Salary Tech Jobs
Technological advances are poised to have the greatest impact on banking, 86 percent of the bank chief executive officers surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP last year said. More than 30 percent of revenues at European banks will be driven by digital transformation in the future, according to McKinsey. That may involve replacing some people with computers. “If a process is measurable or mechanical, it can be automated,” said Anthony Lim, a Singapore-based cybersecurity consultant who has advised the industry group, the International Information System Security Certification Consortium Inc., or (ISC)2, and the Singapore government. “Any area in investment banking that can be automated will be.”

Quote for the day:

"Lead and inspire people. Don't try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead." — -- Ross Perot

March 16, 2015

How a tiny screen has developers rethinking their iPhone apps
Developing for wearables also has gotten Evernote's team talking about whether it should rethink how it lays out all notes in the future, Hull said. If the company becomes good at making predictions, it may reorder note lists based on what it thinks you need, offering a special section in the Evernote app for you to grab the notes instead of performing a search. "Trying to predict what users need before they need it ... is where we see the future of the app going in general across all of our platforms," she said. "This functionality is one of the first places we're trying it, but I absolutely anticipate it will inform what we do in all of our apps in the long term."

My Answers for Microservices Awkward Questions
I think it's reasonable to start with a little context building. When I started working on the application I'm primarily responsible for microservices were very much fringe. Fred George was already giving (great) presentations on the topic, but the idea had gained neither momentum nor hype. I never set out to write "microsevices"; I set out to write a few small projects (codebases) that collaborated to provide a (single) solid user experience. I pushed to move the team to small codebases after becoming frustrated with a monolith I was a part of building and a monolith I ended up inheriting.

What is 'USB Type C' and 'USB 3.1 Gen 1'?
Now, what's interesting about USB Type C is that unlike the MagSafe or Lightning ports you find on other Apple products, it's not proprietary. It is, in fact, part of the USB-IF spec that's been in the works since the end of 2013 and forms part of the USB 3.1 specification. The new MacBook isn't even the first device to feature a USB Type C port, but it was the first to use it so comprehensively, at least until Google unveiled the new Chromebook Pixel a few days later. The port isn't physically backward-compatible with existing USB ports, but the USB 3.1 standard it is built on is, so all that's needed is an adapter to make the conversion. USB Type C is the port, and if you look closely at the specifications, you'll find that Apple claim that the port can do a lot:

Open Compute: More Financial Services Firms Jump In
B of A adds another big name to those of Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs, which were among Open Compute's organizing members. At the summit, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase took part in the proceedings and said they too were adopting Open Compute specified hardware. Both had technology leaders on a panel that discussed financial services adoption of OCP. It included: Brian Armstrong, director of next generation infrastructure at Capital One; Matthew Liste, managing director, global technology at JPMorgan Chase; Grant Richard, managing director for technology at Goldman Sachs; and Bob Thurston, head of global data center engineering at Fidelity. "You already see incredible hardware running fantastic software. ... We view this as an inevitable thing to happen," said Richard.

Open technologies and collaboration = doing cloud right
How often do we experience a true alignment of people’s actions with their words? I bet most of us would say probably not often enough. The IT media is all abuzz with marketing noise about how cloud technology will transform IT, but they don’t always have concrete examples to point to. Check out this interesting project run by some pretty smart people who understand that by marrying open cloud technology with collaboration across multiple organizations they can truly transform IT service delivery.

From connected cows to everlasting elevators: How businesses are using machine learning
Eleven farmers fitted cows with internet-connected pedometers to report the number of steps they took each day to an Azure machine learning system. The system was trained to watch how the cows were moving and spot the spike in steps when the cow went into heat. Farmers would then be alerted by text, allowing them to artificially inseminate the animals at the optimal time. The system proved 95 percent accurate in detecting the onset of ovulation and the number of calves born across the farms rose by an average of 12 percent. Farmers also reported having more time as they no longer had to watch for the signs themselves.

Verizon PCI DSS report a wake-up call, says PCI Security Standards Council
“Often an organisation’s approach to PCI security is to focus on passing the annual compliance assessment. But this is just the start of a vigilant, proactive security program. Only a combination of people, process and technology, and a focus on making security a ‘business-as-usual’ practice, will help thwart these constant threats,” said Orfei. Of all the data breaches studied, Verizon’s findings show that not a single company was fully PCI DSS compliant at the time of the breach. “Another troubling trend from this year’s report is that data security is still inadequate," said Simonetti.

Top 10 Reasons Not to Innovate
The CEO’s rationale was that his predecessor had spent freely chasing bright shiny technology objects to the detriment of the business’ core technology infrastructure. And instead of social media or these other bright shiny technology objects delivering new competitive advantage, they actually left the business with a core infrastructure that daily was becoming less capable than the competition at delivering the core elements of value that customers expect from an online travel site. So, he felt that innovation would be a distraction to the business. Instead he wanted every single resource of the organization marshaled to modernize and stabilize the core technology of their online business to deliver great core value for customers, or there would be gradually fewer customers to deliver value to.

What Is Big Data Discovery?
According to Gartner, “Big Data Discovery” is the next big trend in analytics. It’s the logical combination of three of the hottest trends of the last few years in analytics: Big Data, Data Discovery, and Data Science. Each of these areas has seen explosive growth, but there are clear upsides and downsides to each. For example, Data Discovery excels in ease of use, but allows only limited depth of exploration, while Data Science provides powerful analysis but is slow, complex, and difficult to implement.

Q&A on Conscious Agility
If you’ve achieved a state of antifragility, agility is inherent. Agility itself is excellent, as long as responsiveness is sufficient in your context. However, it ceases to be enough when who you are today is on the fast track toward extinction. An organization has to acknowledge when it is time to undergo a rebirthing and that kind of willingness requires a great deal of courage. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there is necessarily a secret recipe or technique, but perhaps a bit of intuition and a high degree of awareness and foresight is required.

Quote for the day:

"Great leaders understand that mistakes are opportunities. Wrathful leaders see any mistake as the failure of the people involved." -- @ManagersDiary