Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June14, 2015

Big Data and IT-Enabled Services: Ecosystem and Coevolution?
Services, rather than products, are increasingly viewed as the main driver in business and economic growth. 8 Ever more services are available in industries such as healthcare, finance, education, and marketing. Even manufacturing companies are transforming their businesses to be service-oriented. 9 IT has been a powerful enabler behind these transformations and innovations. For example, the benefits of customer relationship management (CRM), a popular service for customer acquisition and retention, can’t be fully realized without IT. Similarly, contemporary services such as e-healthcare, electronic financial services, and e-logistics aren’t possible without IT’s enabling role.

Rise and rise of Internet of Things in India
There's no doubt that the increasing adoption of IoT will certainly have an impact on the job market in India. Some current roles will become redundant. It should, however, also create new opportunities, some of which we cannot even envision today. There will be new opportunities in traditional verticals. Software development, data management, analytics are all areas that should see strong growth as IoT adoption gains momentum. At the same time, some new hybrid verticals (like IT + Medicine) may emerge. Adjusting to changes and learning to work differently, even in traditional roles, in the connected world will be a key to success in the IoT age.

Entering The Digital Economy? Look Beyond The Technology
As the customer experience continues to become increasingly digital, the buying journey and sales pipeline are accelerating at a dizzying pace. There are many more opportunities to initiate transactions, for customers to make requests to businesses, and for businesses to deliver those demands within a time frame the customer expects. As a result, processes have to be instrumented – leading to automation. “The Rise and Implications of Economic Hyperconnectivity,” Pete Swabey, senior editor of technology at EIU, supports this reality by stating, “Where things get really interesting is when those demand signals are fed back into the supply chain. And we have automated systems that draw patterns in demand signals and then pump them into the supply in a market without any human interaction.”

5 Ways To Increase API Adoption
When looking to increase the adoption rate of your application programming interface, or API, these are certainly a few of the questions you should be asking. While APIs and the developers who use them may be working in a unique and different language from the rest of the business world, there’s no doubt that the formula used to grow the popularity, fan base and brand advocates behind a consumer product is the same when applied to the API economy. Inspired by the talk given by ex-ProgrammableWeb editor and CenturyLink Cloud developer content lead Adam DuVander at the 2014 APIcon UK, this piece looks to offer you the tried-and-true principles of marketing, sales, customer service and brand advocacy that come together as a sure-fire way to increase your API adoption.

The Importance Of “Cultural Alignment” for Global Creativity
How does culture impact creativity? What is the difference between “local” and “foreign” creative tasks? And what does that all have to do with crowdsourcing? A recently published article sheds light on the relationship between culture, creativity and the importance of “cultural alignment” for cross-cultural creative tasks. The paper looks at the effect of culture (the extent to which countries have strong cultural norms and enforce them strictly) on peoples’ likelihood to participate in, and succeed at, global creative tasks. It advances a new theoretical model, the “Cultural Alignment Model of Global Creativity,” to understand how culture impacts creativity in a global context.

36 Reasons Why Top IT Projects Fail.
9 months back, I was part of a discussion started by Ron Sheldrick on LinkedIn about the topic — Failure of top IT projects. To this date the discussion is extremely active with many experts leaving their valuable inputs. Inspired by this discussion, I want to outline some of the top reasons projects fail. But before that, let’s have a quick look at the stats related to the success rate of large projects.

Gartner Launches Integrated GRC Research Program
Our “Hype Cycle for GRC Technologies” and “Market Guide for GRC Software Platforms” will highlight a number of technologies and software vendors that span the wider GRC software market. We will also publish a set of reports (Magic Quadrants, Critical Capabilities and Market Guides) focused specifically on seven market segments within GRC. ... The full set of these “OneGRC” research reports will give our readers the best view of the entire GRC software marketplace as they work towards integrating their GRC software solutions. More information about this “OneGRC” research program will be provided this week at our U.S. Summit as well as at our upcoming Summit events across the globe.

Java Bytecode: Bending the Rules
One of the original intentions of Java bytecode was to reduce a Java program’s size. As an emerging language in the fledgling days of the World Wide Web, applets for example, would require a minimal download time. Thus, sending single bytes as instructions was preferred to transmitting human-readable words and symbols. But despite that translation, a Java program expressed as bytecode still largely resembles the original source code. Over time, developers of languages besides Java created compilers to translate those languages into Java bytecode. Today, the list of language-to-Java-bytecode compilers is almost endless and nearly every programming language became executable on the Java virtual machine.

What’s the scope of a business-model?
The catch is that ‘value’ and ‘money’ are not the same: for example, there’s a very big difference between ‘value for money’ and ‘value is money’. Even at best, money is merely a symbol or indicator of perceived-value. And once we move beyond the most simplistic levels of the business-model, it’s absolutely essential not to treat ‘money’ and ‘value’ as synonyms. Which is a problem here, because that’s exactly what BMCanvas does in its ‘Cost-Structure’ and ‘Revenue-Streams’ cells: it describes costs and returns solely in monetary terms – rather than the value-flow terms that we actually need in order to map out and literally ‘validate’ a complete, implementable, testable business-model. To make it work, we need to go back to that initial definition of ‘business-model’: “A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value“.

Who put the “Enterprise” in Architecture?
A strong contender is Westpac – the Australian bank and financial-services provider. Westpac is one of Australia’s Big Four Banks and also the second-largest bank in New Zealand. In the 1990s it embarked on one of the most ambitious and innovative EA projects. The project – known as Core Systems for the 1990s, or CS90 – included many aspects of EA that we take for granted today: component-based architecture, reference models, generated code, and frameworks. The jury remains divided on whether the project was a “success” or not. The project was a victim of a financial crash, so it was never fully completed. Some believe that what was implemented was radical, effective and way ahead of competing architectures, while some argue that it was costly, career-damaging and incomplete.

Quote for the day:

“A true dreamer is one who knows how to navigate in the dark.” -- John Paul Warren

June 13, 2015

Is customer experience management the new CRM?
Dailes says there are some things companies can do to improve customer experience. “The first thing is to listen to your customers. Understand who your clients are. Understand their needs. You can do this through surveys or by watching users. "Another thing that is really important is to have a policy of constant improvement. Rather than look for major changes, look for slow and constant improvement over time, based on feedback. You are always going to have people who shout quite loudly about what they want, but that’s not always the most useful feedback. Look for feedback that represents the majority of users," she says.

Improving One Process Affected 18 Processes Before it Improved Business
So, every time you are going to look at process improvement, we need to focus on these changes in an incremental manner rather than a big bang approach. Instead of starting with process changes in 12 departments, start with changes in 3 departments and then seven departments and then 12 departments. Every time you are going to initiate process improvement, you must understand the impact on all the departments. Identify which of these are low impact, medium impact, and high impact departments. Secondly, identify the processes in each department. ... So, what are the processes we are talking about? Here we go..”Customer acquisition” and “Customer Relationship” and “Requirement Management”. “Requirement Management” in turn is the link to “Marketing” department as they conduct surveys with existing customers as well as prospects.

Steve Wozniak Says The Internet of Things Is in ‘Bubble Phase’
In the tech world, there’s no concrete definition for a “bubble.” However, one way to gauge bubble-like growth is through irrational industry hype. It’s easy to find bullish forecasts on the IoT market. Cisco believes the number of connected devices worldwide will double from 25 billion in 2015 to 50 billion in 2020. IDC claims the global IoT market will grow from $1.9 trillion in 2013 to $7.1 trillion by 2020. That’s why tech giants such as Google and Apple are pushing into smart homes, connected cars, wearable devices, and mobile payments. Spotting that trend, start-ups are flooding the market with IoT and wearable devices for even the silliest niches. A fart-analyzing wearable, a sex-tracking wearable, and a smart bra that detects binge eating all indicate developers are getting carried away with connecting things to the Internet.

Build your own supercomputer out of Raspberry Pi boards
The RPiCluster provides another option for continuing development of projects that require MPI [Message Passing Interface] or Java in a cluster environment. Second, RPis provide a unique feature in that they have external low-level hardware interfaces for embedded systems use, such as I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO. This is very useful to electrical engineers requiring testing of embedded hardware on a large scale. Third, having user only access to a cluster is fine if the cluster has all the necessary tools installed. If not however, you must then work with the cluster administrator to get things working. Thus, by building my own cluster I could outfit it with anything I might need directly. Finally, RPis are cheap! The RPi platform has to be one of the cheapest ways to create a cluster of 32 nodes.

Naomi Lefkovitz explains what NIST's privacy risk framework means for agencies
with the Cybersecurity Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure we were directed to include a methodology for privacy and civil liberties by the executive order. And that methodology was derived from the consensus-based document. And, essentially, at a high level it says, well, 'Consider the privacy implications when you're doing your cybersecurity measures.' That's a very high-level paraphrase, but that's sort of the concept. What we're doing with the risk management framework, which is aimed at federal systems but nonetheless, the concept is, 'OK, how do you consider those privacy implications? How do you go about identifying privacy risk?' Because we're never seen that process laid out.

Keep it simple and risk-based to secure collaboration
Having identified risks, the process of analysing and then treating those risks should be carried out. The key to this process is proportionality. If the risk treatment becomes too expensive, in terms of time, resources or money, is it worth doing based on the risk? Equally, if the treatment makes doing the job, such as collaborating with a fellow employee, unwieldy and difficult, then the treatment has also failed. It may make the process safer in security terms, but has also made it more difficult and less efficient in achieving operational, business objectives. Security should enable, not inhibit and should always take into consideration the user experience. While risk treatment of a system or process will always be different, there are common themes which form the foundation of a well-managed, and ultimately secure, approach.

Content blocking via geolocation takes world wide out of the web
This is a subject of renewed interest for the European Commission, which formally announced the Digital Single Market initiative last month; the initiative is intended to identify and address issues related to the digital and physical delivery of goods and services across the 28 EU member countries. According to The Guardian, presently only 15% of online shoppers in the EU buy products from another country, while only 7% of small and medium sized businesses sell products across national borders. ... Interestingly, in an effort to limit the need for users to rely on a VPN to access content,Netflix monitors file sharing traffic to identify what films and TV programs are locally popular, and the company acquires the rights for those programs in order to provide a legal (and sanctioned) means to view that content in that country.

Cisco New Intercloud Services Focus on Next Generation Internet of Things Market
Organizations are demanding new ways to manage the exponential growth of data and the ability to obtain real-time analysis. To meet this need, Cisco collaborates with leading Big Data solutions such as MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and Apache Hadoop community. Working with these partners, Cisco safely extends Hadoop solutions on-premise to the cloud and provide a true hybrid deployment. It is also providing end customers to maintain the same policies, control and security in their Big Data implementations, as well as greater flexibility and an unlimited virtual scalability.

8 New Big Data Projects To Watch
The big data community has a secret weapon when it comes to innovation: open source. The granddaddy of big data, Apache Hadoop, was born in open source, and its growth will come from continued innovation in done by the community in the open. Here are eight open source projects generating buzz now in the community. ... Zeppelin essentially provides a Web front-end for Spark. The mighty Zep brings a notebook-based approach to giving users data discovery, exploration, and visualization of Spark apps in an interactive manner. The software, which is modeled on the IPython notebook, supports Spark and other frameworks, such as Flink, Tajo, and Ignite.

Cloud tech can make a Supreme Court decision against Obamacare irrelevant
Healthcare.gov is illegal, argue lawyers for Obamacare’s opponents. Their argument against the Affordable Care Act splits hairs about the law’s construction. The underlying legislation designates federal subsidies to be paid through tax credits to the buyers of health insurance purchased on state-operated exchanges. The ACA is silent about the eligibility for subsidies of purchases on the federally operated exchange healthcare.gov. The plaintiffs argue that the subsidies can’t be given to buyers using the federal exchange healthcare.gov, and only can be given to the buyers using the state exchanges such as Cover Oregon.

Quote for the day:

"You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them." -- Michael Jordan

June 12, 2015

Cyber Essentials made mandatory by the Welsh Government
Quoted by SCMagazineUK.com, a Welsh Government spokesperson said: “From 1 April 2015, Cyber Essentials is required for all relevant Welsh Government contracts involving the handling of personal or sensitive information. This will also apply to National Procurement Service collaborative frameworks.” The Welsh Government has identified five levels of risk from 0 to 4. Level 0 is ‘low risk’, and means that no special arrangements are needed when minimal amounts of non-sensitive personal data are processed. ... “The CES defines a set of controls which, when properly implemented, will provide organisations with basic protection from the most prevalent forms of threat coming from the internet. Evidence of holding a Cyber Essentials (or equivalent) certificate is desirable before contract award, but essential at the point when data is to be passed to the supplier.”

3 Accidental Whistleblowers (Fired for Doing their Jobs Well)
As Adam Turteltaub, SCCE VP of Membership Services, puts it: “Whistleblowers are courageous, principled heroes, unless they are on my team, in which case they are dirty rotten traitors.” Whistleblowers are like the foreign body in the organization being attacked by its white blood cells. Or the nail sticking out of the board, begging to be hammered. The modern compliance program has as its stated goal to find, fix and prevent problems. Whistleblowers are a key resource in achieving this goal. But still, the white blood cells remain vigilant. But what happens when the whistleblower is a senior manager, head of a control function or even a CEO, who happens upon the problem – sometimes a very large problem – in the ordinary course of doing their job well?

When Big Hearts Meet Big Data: 6 Nonprofits Using Data to Change the World
When people think of big data, they often think of machines, robots and things that might be generally impersonal. But when you couple data with an altruistic mission, the results can be astounding. As we sink deeper into the digital era, nonprofits are now presented with new opportunities. For example, 56% of people donated to an organization because they read a story via social media. Fundraising sites such as DonorsChoose.org, Causes.com and Network for Good allow organizations to raise money with a simple click of a button. But this is only the beginning. Here we’ll take a look at which organizations have upped the ante by becoming not only socially-driven, but data-driven as well. See how these 6 nonprofits are using data to empower others and make a genuine difference in the world.

Twitter's next CEO faces four challenges
Perhaps the biggest problem Twitter has is that many people who aren't tech enthusiasts still don't understand what it's for or why they should use it. For every occasion Twitter is referred to as a social network, it's also identified as a news source, a publishing system, a feed of real-time events and a micro blog. Perhaps it's all those things, but that doesn't help sell it to people who aren't yet on the service. If it's a social network, why use it when Facebook's around? If it's a micro blog, why not use a proper blog like Tumblr instead? ... The company has tried to address these issues with new tools. Earlier this year, it began rolling out a feature called "instant timeline" that uses a variety of signals, including the contacts on a person's smartphone, to see who they might want to follow and automatically create a list.

Cybersecurity Firm Rapid7 Files For $80 Million IPO
The cybersecurity industry is booming as breaches and nation state attacks continue to dominate headlines. While VC investment in cybersecurity is on the rise, cybersecurity IPOs in the United States have been few and far between. Since November 2009, there have only been 17 IPOs in the security space (seven of which happened in 2012), according to research done by Pitchbook. The most recent security IPO was MobileIron’s $100 million exit almost a full year ago in July 2014. FireEye had biggest security IPO in the past five years at $349 million in September 2013.

Big Data Systems House Sensitive Data, Security Exposures
The result is an exposure that companies may not have counted on as they initiated their pilot big data projects, according to the survey report, "Enabling Big Data By Removing Security and Compliance Barriers," available here (registration required). Cloudera, the supplier of Hadoop system Cloudera Enterprise, sponsored the SANS survey. Many times, those projects demonstrate the utility of bringing together diverse data that was previously hard to assemble given the radically different data types. Big data systems gain utility as more data is brought in. The result is a slow brew of gathering risk without sufficient safeguards, the study warns.

Data as currency: Balancing risk vs. reward
At the heart of good IG is good recordkeeping, and therefore the senior records manager must be a key player in the IG initiative. Also vital to the program are compliance officers to help ensure the recordkeeping practices are satisfying the demands of such laws as Sarbanes-Oxley for the financial industry and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; IT executives to provide the right tools and to help effect proper protection policies; legal counsel to help assure the defensibility of the program; and senior managers from the business units to provide realistic guidance on how the information is created and used. Organizations wishing to monetize their big data should work to mitigate the security risks by implementing an IG program that treats records as the strategic assets they really are.

Mobility brings new ways to tackle IT security threats
The unique nature of mobile operating systems themselves has also provided new security opportunities. For example, mobile devices have managed to avoid many of the antivirus concerns that threaten Windows PCs, thanks to more closed operating systems such as Apple iOS, said Chris Hazelton, research director for enterprise mobility at 451 Research. OS vendors can still do more to help, including allowing IT to turn off specific app permissions and ensuring third-party apps can't collect employee data, he said. "A developer can sell and monetize your information if they can track your location," he added.

Why Data Lakes Require Semantics
According to Nick Heudecker, research director at Gartner, “Data lakes typically begin as ungoverned data stores. Meeting the needs of wider audiences requires curated repositories with governance, semantic consistency and access controls.” Heudecker also says that “…without at least some semblance of information governance, the lake will end up being a collection of disconnected data pools or information silos all in one place.” ... Adding Semantic technologies can address many of the issues inherent in Data Lakes if an organization needs to rapidly answer complex, real world questions that require the fusion of data in many dimensions. Semantic Data Lake (SDL) is a semantically integrated, self-descriptive data-repository based on graph (network) representation of multi-source, heterogeneous data, including free text narratives.

Q&A with Claudio Perrone on PopcornFlow / Evolve and Disrupt
In lean, we often talk about value streams. Yet, it's not what we do, but rather what we learn by doing it that matters. When I look at a typical scrum or kanban board, however, all I see is a snapshot of the outcome of the thinking behind it. Perhaps we are missing an opportunity. Popcorn flow accelerates, sustains and brings to the surface the reasoning (how and what we learn), specifically through a continuous stream of small and traceable change experiments. This is a vivid example of what I call a "learning stream". Value streams and learning streams work together and help us make progress like rails on a ladder. The trick is to make both visible. Most teams use two separate boards. But some teams who adopted this approach now split their single visual board horizontally.

Quote for the day:

"A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them." -- John Maxwell,

June 11, 2015

Q&A: Nina Bjornstad, Country Manager For The UK And Ireland, Google For Work
The core shift has to be us taking those principles of how we interact with our mobile phones on a daily basis and bringing them into the work environment. Introducing a greater sense of play into what we can accomplish, just like we would with an app; or leveraging cloud platform technologies so that we are able to stand a service up, try it out, shut it back down if it's not impacting the business, or grow it further if it is. Businesses need to have their “wow” moment; their ability to have this sense of play and the ability for them to understand what type of consumer-level behaviour is actually possible to bring into the business environment today.

Cloud storage survey highlights security concerns
Cloud storage gateways are replacing and augmenting traditional file servers and tape storage, particularly in remote or branch offices (ROBO). One third of all organisations with more than 50 ROBOs have implemented on-premise cloud storage gateways that support both the private cloud and public cloud, and 27 per cent of all companies have implemented them. Enterprises are coming under pressure to establish contemporary cloud storage solutions that provide the visibility and control required to meet enterprise needs and industry regulations. In the more heavily regulated financial services, government and life sciences industries 42 per cent prefer a completely private cloud that does not rely on external hosted infrastructure, as do 40 per cent of organisations with 10,000 employees or more.

Redefining Loyalty Programs with Big Data and Hadoop
There’s no such thing as too much data when it comes to this sort of analytics work. Every business analyst and data scientist agrees that expanding the data for any given model will typically produce dramatic improvements in analysis. And that data will obviously come in a wide variety of formats—structured, semi-structured, and unstructured, big and small, near and real-time, as well as historical. Try to store it all in a traditional data warehouse, and you may wipe out all of the profits gained from segmentation. You will almost certainly have availability issues, and you will spend a lot of time waiting for IT to massage the data into a form that can be analyzed.

Dutch Cyber Security Council boosts focus on privacy
“The Netherlands aims at being an open, secure and economically promising digital society. A society that is innovative and entrepreneurial, but which is also strong enough to face the risks that go hand-in-hand with our great dependency on IT,” the council says in its 2015 briefing document. “The cyber world is a world full of unknown possibilities and opportunities, but there is also a darker side to it. “Our lives are becoming more comfortable and less tied to times and places, but our privacy is also coming under increasing pressure and cyber crime is on the increase as well. To continue to stimulate our prosperity and economy, cyber security is therefore of crucial importance,” the document says.

Cyber-Espionage Nightmare
It’s not a surprise that such systems are relatively easy to co-opt for nefarious purposes. Ideas for making the Internet more secure have been around for decades, and academic and government labs have churned out interesting proposals. ... “You don’t hear about rebuilding the Internet anymore,” says Greg Shannon, chief scientist at the CERT division of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute. What’s a company to do? Wyatt tightened things at United Steelworkers; among other things, he now gives fewer employees so-called administrative privileges to their computers, and he searches the network for the telltale signs of communications by malware. But none of this would have prevented the intrusions. Wyatt says it “might have slowed them down.”

Under pressure: enterprises want better software, delivered faster and cheaper
Successful applications increasingly require greater technical complexity and sophistication -- 51 percent, for instance, believe that the mobile and web application user experience will become significantly more sophisticated in the next year. Enterprises expect these more sophisticated apps to be created over a shorter timeline without a corresponding increase in developer capacity. For example, 65 percent of companies successfully managing these processes say they need to release new features or bug fixes for their applications at least once a month. Another six percent are even pumping out new releases every other week. The proliferation of different devices also creates development and deployment challenges, the survey finds.

Ciena Builds Advanced Network for NOAA Environmental Research
The new network will enable NOAA to support bandwidth-intensive applications and programs such as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite series R (GOES-R), and the next-generation national weather observation satellite program, which is working to advance weather and climate science and services. NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts. Its N-Wave science network, initially founded via funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is a national spanning network that provides intra-NOAA connectivity, including communication and data transfer (5 Petabytes per month) between NOAA programs, line offices, research facilities and other scientific centers across CONUS, Alaska and Hawaii.

Predicting the next decade of tech
There's another complication in that CIOs increasingly don't control the budget dedicated to innovation, as this is handed onto other business units (such as marketing or digital) that are considered to have a more entrepreneurial outlook. CIOs tend to blame their boss's conservative attitude to risk as the biggest constraint in making riskier IT investments for innovation and growth. Although CIOs claim to be willing to take risks with IT investments, this attitude does not appear to match up with their current project portfolios. Another part of the problem is that it's very hard to measure the return on some of these technologies. Managers have been used to measuring the benefits of new technologies using a standard return-on-investment measure that tracks some very obvious costs -- headcount or spending on new hardware

IT continues to struggle to find software developers, data analysts
Part of the problem may lie with candidates' perceptions of a company's brand, says Tejal Parekh, HackerRank's vice president of marketing. "We work with a lot of customers in areas that aren't typically thought of as technology hotspots. For instance, in the finance sector we have customers facing a dearth of IT talent; they're all innovative companies with a strong technology focus, but candidates don't see them as such. They want to go to Facebook or Amazon," says Parekh. Another challenge lies with the expectations hiring companies have of their candidate pool, says Ravinskar. "There's also an unconscious bias issue with customers who sometimes limit themselves by not looking outside the traditional IT talent pool. They're only considering white, male talent from specific schools or specific geographic areas," says Ravinskar.

Managing Technology with CORE Strategy & Architectural C’s & P’s
What do you do to pursue the opportunities in an organization? In my opinion, these opportunities can be realized by taking four actions –Consolidate, Optimize, Refresh and Enable(CORE) on organization’s technology and system portfolios. These four opportunity vectors form the basis of a handy planning tool, which I call the CORE strategy. Inspired by Kim & Mauborgne [1]’s Four Actions Framework, the idea of CORE came from my experience as IT manager and architect. CORE is all about managing technologies, prioritizing IT spending and allocating resource on the basis of raising or creating capabilities (represented at right-hand side in the diagram), and reducing or eliminating cost & risk

Quote for the day:

"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts." -- Larry Ellison

June 09, 2015

Are you prepared for the future of data centers?
Colocation requires a shift in data center skillsets, Koppy noted, not handing the data center over to a third party. Ask questions -- specifics about the colocation provider's network and power paths and so on -- and if the colocation provider is unwilling to share information your own facilities team would know, consider that a red flag, Courtemanche said. Also, talk to the provider's long-term customers to gauge how your own experience might be. ... There are two problem areas data centers with more than 1,000 servers experience at a much higher rate than smaller ones, according to survey results from IDC: downtime due to human error and security breaches. As one AFCOM Symposium attendee put it, when you outsource, your job goes from managing the data center to managing the colocation provider.

The top 10 myths about agile development
To be flexible has become vital for a business in today’s global markets, and therefore, the ability for IT systems to be equally flexible is essential. The purpose of agile is to allow organisations to react to the increasingly dynamic opportunities and challenges of today’s business world, in which IT has become one of the key enablers. Agile is defined by four values and 12 principles found in the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto provides an umbrella definition, in which there are many other delivery and governance frameworks, such as Scrum or extreme programming, for example.

Is Nepotism Undermining Your Business Technology Innovation?
We no longer do the break-fix relationship. We have a strategy manager that essentially acts as a CIO and manages technology as our clients grow and innovate. You need someone to be there every time you grow and change out a piece of technology and that person needs to have extensive experience throughout your industry with companies of all sizes. A small company that is a family friend doesn’t have that kind of expertise. ... Most “family friend” businesses don’t have this in place and have no idea what sort of support their users are getting, how the response time is or which issues are being resolved and escalated. You don’t have the capital to pay your users to hang out waiting for a call back on an issue.

Erasure Coding For Fun and Profit
Erasure coding essentially uses maths to add a little bit of extra data to the end of the actual data so that if you lose part of this new, bigger amount of data, you can still get all of the original data back. A simple version is a checksum: sum all the ones and zeros and put that at the end. If you lose any one of the bits, you can figure out what it was by re-calculating the checksum and comparing it to the stored checksum. The difference is what the bit was, basically. This is a vast over-simplification, but that’s basically it. ... There’s a downside (there’s always a downside). If you lose a disk, you have to rebuild all the data from the parity blocks scattered around the place, which reduces the performance of the array because some of the time is spent on the rebuild instead of serving up the data.

Obama vows to boost U.S. cyber defenses amid signs of China hacking
"We have to be as nimble, as aggressive and as well-resourced as those who are trying to break into these systems," Obama told a news conference at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Germany. U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have blamed Chinese hackers for breaching the computers of the Office of Personnel Management and compromising the records of up to four million current and former employees in one of the biggest known attacks on U.S. federal networks. The mission of the intruders, the officials said, appears to have been to steal personal information for recruiting spies and ultimately to seek access to weapons plans and industrial secrets.

Rise of the Surveillance Platform
Hildyard likened a trade-surveillance platform to a buy-and-build hybrid. Such a system requires customization to effectively detect and prevent abuse, as each market ecosystem is unique. But at the same time, building the capability from the ground up is unrealistic. Delivering surveillance via a platform rather than an application gives developers leeway to develop code that’s unique to their organization and the types of behaviors they need to monitor. Sell-side banks “can’t rely on an application to do that,” Hildyard said. “The frequency with which regulatory hot topics emerge is increasing over time,” Hildyard said. Additionally, trade surveillers’ “goal should be to ‘create’ the next big scandal and make sure it doesn’t happen on their watch, in their bank. That requires that they understand behaviors they weren’t previously monitoring for.”

Transforming Text and Data Into a True Knowledge Base
One of the steps in text mining is “relationship identification.” Once entities are identified and enriched, they are connected to other entities; for example, “Foggy Bottom is in Washington, DC”, “Foggy Bottom is near The White House” and “Foggy Bottom is east of Georgetown.” What just happened? We used Open Linked Data (LOD) to verify Foggy Bottom as a neighborhood that exists in Washington DC while also connecting it to other entities. LOD knows that DC is a “District” (not a state) and that it is within the United States. Preexisting facts were combined with results from text analysis to expand the knowledge base.

APIs with Swagger : An Interview with Reverb’s Tony Tam
First, we don’t want to try to stuff every possible feature inside the specification itself. Early on, someone brought up embedding rate-limiting information into the spec. But it would be very difficult to generalize, and would pollute the spec over a feature that possibly many people wouldn’t care about. Next, one thing we learned through the initial versions of Swagger is that it’s easy to write invalid specifications without a simple and robust validator. We chose to use JSON Schema validations, and even built it directly into Swagger-UI. It is an important part of the tooling to help developers write valid Swagger definitions. Removing structural constraints from the spec AND having a robust validation tool would be very difficult.

Case study: What the enterprise can learn from Etsy's DevOps strategy
“You have to be able to demonstrate to the larger business why it’s not just a buzzword and can add value to the business, and the only way to do that is to give them a concrete project and show them how it has positively affected the business,” he says. “The people who make the decisions at the top of the pile may be more business-minded than technically so, and you need to speak their language and demonstrate the impact it has had on key performance indicators or revenue that quarter. “You need to sell the idea to them in business terms because IT and development are service organisations that exist to fulfil the priorities of the business,” Cowie adds.

A Brief History of Big Data Everyone Should Read
Long before computers (as we know them today) were commonplace, the idea that we were creating an ever-expanding body of knowledge ripe for analysis was popular in academia. Although it might be easy to forget, our increasing ability to store and analyze information has been a gradual evolution – although things certainly sped up at the end of the last century, with the invention of digital storage and the internet. With Big Data poised to go mainstream this year, here’s a brief(ish) look at the long history of thought and innovation which have led us to the dawn of the data age.

Quote for the day:

"Every leader needs to look back once in awhile to make sure he has followers." -- Kouzes and Posner