Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 21, 2015

Less Dogma Equals Better Decision Making

To seize new opportunities, executives need to constantly review their articles of faith—or convictions of how the world works. The challenge, however is that too many of today’s leaders “like what they like” and “know what they know”. New and valuable information is often declared anathema or quickly discarded, especially when it contradicts an already stated direction or opinion. Moreover, our information systems aren’t helping very much. That vaunted “single source” of truth whether enterprise data warehouse in the early 2000s or enterprise data lake today, still looks far from reality, especially as today’s data lakes are mostly used as data dumping grounds from which various LOB data marts import spurious and questionable data sets.

What Keeps Intel’s CISO Up at Night?

Within Intel’s own IT organization, one thing that helps address the complexity of securing the infrastructure and stay on top of the latest in security tech is partnering with security vendors instead of simply paying them for their products and services, Conran said. Intel has such a partnership with CyberArk Software, a security company whose market debut last September was one of the year’s hottest tech IPOs. Instead of worrying about securing the perimeter, CyberArk specializes in dealing with threats that are already inside the enterprise network. The company is an expert in privileged account security, Udi Mokady, its president and CEO, said. Hackers gaining access to privileged accounts is one of the leading threats today.

4 Ways to Lead Ruthless Innovation

Ambitious, determined, focused entrepreneurs don't choose a career in civil service at a local government office. Similarly anyone looking for two-hour lunch breaks and an easy workload shouldn't choose to work in a fast growing Fortune 500 company that sprouts more innovation every 12 months than many companies create in a lifetime. Amazonians who did their research well prior to accepting a job offer should not be surprised. When I read the New York Times article I winced at some of the personal examples, but quietly nodded along with some of the points of intense focus and relentlessness.

Data security, the achilles heel of DevOps

Forty-six percent of DevOps leaders report data issues as the biggest challenge to enabling their organizations to use DevOps in testing environments. A majority indicate that developers and quality assurance personnel have access to production data, yet this access is not audited (72%). More than two-thirds of all respondents (71%) report that masked data is refreshed from production only once a week or less. Still, a majority, 62%, say full production data is necessary for development and quality assurance. What's unclear is how much of this data may be sensitive or personally identifiable information. The more copies that get sent out to other parts of the organization -- or even outside -- the greater the risk of it being compromised.

Windows Server Getting Open Source Mesos Container Technology for Scaled Operations

Microsoft this week announced its third preview of Windows Server 2016 which features Windows Server Containers, built on Docker's open source container technology. This Docker operating system virtualization technology is designed to make it easier to deploy applications without conflict. Like Mesos, Docker's container solutions were originally designed for Linux servers. The new Mesosphere partnership announced today to bring Mesos to Windows Server is just another open source project overseen by the Apache Mesos organization. The code will be "freely available" and it will integrate with Mesosphere's DCOS, according to Microsoft's announcement. The latest version of the code is already available at the Apache Mesos GitHub repository.

C-Suite and Techies: Best Security Results for the Least Cost

Implementing a new solution does not always require high expense. There are many free and open-source security solutions that should be considered as well. Often, open-source solutions can operate on less expensive or older hardware while providing capability and security equivalent to many commercial options. Open source is not always going to provide the best solution, it might not even provide your organization with a viable option. However, it is important to at least consider open-source solutions when a solution survey is performed. Skipping open source for an odd reason, such as there is no dedicated technical support, because there is no-one to sue, or because of the belief that anything good has to be paid for, is just silly and short-sighted.

Algorithmic Video Editor Turns Amateur Athletes into GoPro Heroes

Software isn’t capable of creative decisions, but Allen says the relatively formulaic structure of extreme sports videos is within its grasp. Shred’s software sets out to make movies that begin with slow moving, establishing shots, for example showing the beach or ski slope at the start of a trip; transition to highlights of the adrenaline pumping action; and then wind down with more shots of scenery and people at the end. “That formula still works even though you’re not doing the most extreme backflips,” says Allen. The software selects footage to use by looking at time stamps and the pattern of acceleration in the frame. It can also shorten and remix any song provided by the user, using algorithms that can identify and edit the different musical parts of a track.

Five digital disruptors talk successes and strategies

"The killing of the IT tile was a rebranding of who we are as an organization and how we're delivering," Colangelo said. Like other platform companies -- Colangelo pointed to Twitter and Netflix as examples -- technology is the backbone of this new business model, not just an enabler of business as usual. "The CTO role at Twitter and other organizations is more public facing and technology is core to product delivery," he said. "That's the recognition at HMH -- that technology is fueling and unlocking so much in the company." Colangelo retains his CIO responsibilities and continues to run HMH's enterprise services and back-office functionality; he's still shifting on-premises applications to the cloud and building an IT as a service model for the business. But his position no longer begins and ends in the back office.

Google Reveals How It Scales Its Network

One major reason for sharing information about its network now is that Google is opening up its infrastructure and offering Google Cloud platform services to others, Google Fellow Amin Vahdat told CIO Journal. “Having a great distributed computing infrastructure requires a world-class network to connect servers together,” he said. Google said it would like developers at other companies to understand they can run jobs such as Big Data analytics on its infrastructure with reliable speed and performance. The company has not shared this level of detail previously because it considers networking a key differentiator, he said. ... “We have some big challenges around availability, configuration and management of the infrastructure and overall predictability,” said Dr. Vahdat

Vulnerability in enterprise-managed iOS devices puts business data at risk

The impact to enterprises depends on the kind of information that might be exposed through their managed app configurations. Appthority scanned millions of apps and found that the majority of those with vulnerable configuration data were MDM clients, corporate apps that grant access to work email and business documents and secure browsers used on internal networks. "We also found apps used in the healthcare industry, giving doctors access to patient data and records," whose compromise could result in possible violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the researchers said.

Quote for the day:

"Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important." -- Seth Godin

August 20, 2015

10 Tips to Improve your Corporate Sustainability

Most sustainability initiatives are initiated without a thorough analysis of their outcomes. Many of them are funded for many years, with very little due diligence on their outcomes. Every sustainability initiative should always include a feedback loop in the processes that it undertakes. It could start, simply, by periodically assessing the performance and outcomes of the sustainability initiatives. If this is not possible then the initiative itself needs to be reviewed and outcomes clearly stated before it is allowed to continue. The feedback loop should reach as many affected stakeholders as possible. Once identified, the initiatives with the strongest feedback loop will most likely be identified as the high performers.

New chips took a backseat to robots and 3D cameras

Intel didn’t talk much about its upcoming Skylake desktop CPUs this week, but it did reveal that the chip has an integrated DSP used for a feature called Intel Smartsound, whch will allow computers to listen out for audio signals without using up too much power. It worked with Microsoft to build an upcoming technology for Windows 10 called Wake on Voice, which will let you walk up to a Windows 10 in sleep mode and bring it to life by saying “Hey Cortana.” Some smartphones already have this always-listening feature, but it’s not available yet on a PC. The catch is, we’re told Wake on Voice won’t arrive with the first Skylake chips, which means it won’t be supported in the first wave of Windows 10 PCs.

Patient care put at risk by IT problems at London NHS trust

Southwark’s continuing care team ran into further difficulties when it emerged that administrators were classifying patients in inconsistent ways on the TCM database. In one case staff were using the “deceased” field in the database to record the date of the end of a care package, creating confusion over whether patients were living or dead, Rochford revealed. In another case, administrators were only classifying cancer patients under palliative care, whether they were terminally ill or not, while failing to record other patients with life-threatening conditions as palliative, she said. “You could not follow a patient history. I could not tell what their diagnosis was, whether it was cancer or dementia, because they were coding them in the wrong way,” she said.

NFV use cases emerge as IoT evolves

IoT applications have very different network requirements and characteristics than the smartphones and tablets that currently dominate mobile networks. CSPs have started to use NFV to build IoT-specific sections of their mobile networks with new, virtual Evolved Packet Cores (EPCs). EPCs have many sub-elements that providers will use in different combinations for specific IoT applications. Virtual EPCs give CSPs the ability to cost-effectively customize their networks for individual customers, industries and applications -- critical in the diverse world of IoT. In addition to the EPC, additional NFV elements that CSPs may use to enable the IoT include routing, security, SDN controllers, monitoring and service assurance.

Design Thinking Comes of Age

Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems.

Rise of the IoT Architect

It seems sensible to have just such a role dedicated to IoT with the necessary breadth in know-how to oversee the many constituent roles and teams. The challenge of course is that with IoT being so nascent there are very few people with the level of skills, knowledge and business authority let alone actual experience across so many disciplines. Creating current architects can take years and some think that this role may take a decade to establish. Of course that means in the interim there will be challenges, but it also means that organizations who see IoT as being significant to their future need to start investing in such individuals now. The flip side to this is that there are current roles within organizations that already possess elements of the skills required by an IoT architect.

How HTTP/2 Eliminates Technical Debt

The technical debt here is accumulated because the code is tightly-coupled to those hosts (and there’s technical ops debt, too, in maintaining those additional CNAMEs in DNS but for today let’s just focus on the code, shall we?) and any changes to the hosts requires changes to the application. Which is bad, because they can be spread out across a whole lot of code in a larger organization. Domain sharding in the application itself, too, can be a burden on the network and downright horrific for mobile applications as it requires additional DNS lookups along with all the extra overhead associated with TCP connections. A new binary framing layer enables full request and response multiplexing and eliminates the need for multiple connections.

Threat intelligence needs to grow up

“Threat intelligence,” added Glines, “is also internal threats, not just rogue employees but machines and devices that are rogue. It’s also employees that don’t know any better.” Enterprises need to do an internal audit to understand their internal and external vulnerabilities because they can’t protect themselves if they don’t know what they are protecting against. “It’s important to understand the attack life cycle, and there are free and open source information feeds out there. The problem with open source feeds is that they provide a lot of information that is not always valuable.” More boutique vendors will be able to provide companies with more valuable and accurate information that will assess intelligence and invest appropriately based on customer needs.

Francis Ford Coppola muses on power of instinct in data-driven culture

Coppola said he relies on instinct and his subconscious, which for him sometimes acts like a broken record, repeating the same thing over and over, to help surface a good idea or the right fit for a role. Specifically with casting, he said it's hard not to root for each candidate in the moment, so he gives himself space and time to mentally sift through auditions before making a decision. "You know how you go to a party and the next day, one person you met sticks with you. That's what I do with casting. Who stuck with me that I can't stop thinking about?" he said. But risks don't always equate to reward -- even for Coppola.

Version Control, Git, and Your Enterprise

Developers want the power to do whatever they may find a need to do. With Git they have more granular control of what is done and how, then they have experienced with other tools. Often Git’s large array of operations is split into two categories – the porcelain and the plumbing. Obviously making an analogy to something like a sink, the point being made is that the traditional tools let you interact with the porcelain, that is the abstraction and controlled interface to the tool, but Git also lets you get under the basin and behind the faucets to change how version control is executed, including rewriting history. Whether a developer needs that power or not, they like knowing that it is at their disposal to use.

Quote for the day:

“Think continally about what you want, not about the things you fear.” -- Brian Tracy

August 19, 2015

Demystifying Data Governance: What it Is and What it’s Not

The key to establishing a solid data governance foundation is to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive approach. It’s common to adopt data governance after poor data quality results in a bad business outcome or when no one takes responsibility for an error. Having a formalized, proactive data governance approach ensures that somebody is clearly responsible not only for fixing the disasters but also for reducing the likelihood of one occurring. ... The term “data owner” is actually a misnomer because, in practice, what is owned is not the data but the standards that guide users in how to achieve good quality. So while many departments may lay claim to the contents of the data, it is the data governance group itself that owns the structures and the quality rules.

BPM drilldown: Product leadership value discipline

As companies take steps toward digital business-ship, CIOs are increasingly being called upon to optimize customer-facing processes. And they're turning to business process management principles to make that happen. One useful tenet of BPM: deciding which of three core value disciplines -- operational excellence, product leadership and customer intimacy -- is most important to the business and then adopting the characteristics of that discipline. In this webcast presentation, Ken Lewis, ITIL consultant at PA Consulting Group, drills down into the product leadership value discipline, laying out goals for a company that prioritizes it above the others.

How the tech industry is greening its data centers

"Traditionally, data centers were call centers. You put them out in suburban and exurban areas," she says. That's where land needed for the center and cooling has been cheaper."When you start integrating renewable generation and DC power networks into your data center choices, you don't have to go to those exurban and suburban locations anymore. You can put them where you want them and where your talent really wants to be," says Redfield. "The road blocks are the same as to any increased penetration of renewables, she says. "Where the grid is already reliable and there's plenty of baseload power generation, renewals are particularly slow to penetrate." The challenge, she says, is to convince companies that they need renewables where there's already an energy infrastructure – even if that infrastructure is close to being maxed out.

3 Ways The Internet Of Things Will Change Every Business

A big part of the Internet of Things isn’t so much about smart devices, but about sensors. These tiny innovations can be attached to everything from yogurt cups to the cement in bridges and then record and send data back into the cloud. This will allow businesses to collect more and more specific feedback on how products or equipment are used, when they break, and even what users might want in the future. ... The most important thing to do when considering how the Internet of Things will affect your business is to think bigger — much bigger. It’s not just about what kind of products you can make “smart,” or how information could impact your business efficiencies, or how you might sell that data to customers and partners.

Why A Trillion-Dollar Enterprise Practice Desperately Needs Disruption

Clearly, the age-old IT procurement bureaucracy is unable to keep up with current advancements in technology. CIOs spend time and pay hefty fees to draft nebulous RFPs and short-list potential vendors. The RFPs are then floated, in response to which service providers churn out long, flowery proposals where they pitch their track records and show examples of happy clients. The whole process can take anywhere from 4 weeks to over 6 months. But in the age of Watson and the Hoverboard, is this really the right way to build technology? Through my own software services marketplace VenturePact, I work with hundreds of CIOs who'd say it wasn't and have moved on from RFPs.

Amazon's Data-Driven Approach Becoming More Common

"What they were able to do was to go in and increase the staffing before they had significant attrition," Barnett said. "The beauty of systems like this is you're able to link actions to outcomes." The downside to a data-driven approach is t can seem "Big Brother"-ish to staffers. But Glint said the surveys that the company sends out have an 80 to 85 percent response rate. "Employees tend to be willing to share," Barnett said. Another drawback: Relying strictly on numbers can lead to the perception of a cold-hearted workplace. "It's easy to get so hung up on statistics that you miss the value of what that individual brings to the table in terms of personality, connectivity and those intangible pieces," said David Lewis, CEO of HR outsourcing and consulting firm OperationsInc in Norwalk, Conn.

Cisco: Flash exploits are soaring

Corporate security pros need to be on the lookout for malware designed to evade detection and also damage the operating systems of the machines it infects if detection efforts become too persistent, the report says. It uses Rombertik as an example of such malware because it performs pointless operations while it is in security sandboxes in an effort to wait out analysis or to delay discovery. Rombertik attempts to overwrite master boot records and if it fails, will destroy all files in users’ home folders. Should it go undetected, then it starts its primary function, stealing data typed into browsers. “It’s a solid bet other malware authors will not only appropriate Rombertik’s tactics but may make them even more destructive,” the report says.

Physicists Unveil First Quantum Interconnect

One of the most promising forms of number crunching is the quantum computer and its various associate quantum technologies, such as quantum communication, quantum cryptography, quantum metrology, and so on. Physicists have made great strides in building proof-of-principle devices that exploit the laws of quantum physics to perform feats that would be impossible with purely classical mechanics. And yet a significant problem remains. These devices must work in isolation since nobody has perfected a way of joining them together effectively. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Mark Thompson at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and a few pals around the world.

Hacking Case Raises Question on Securities Fraud

Stealing confidential information to trade on it before publication is nothing new, although the cases now seem rather quaint because they involved getting advanced word before print editions were delivered to subscribers. The Carpenter case involved a Wall Street Journal reporter who traded and tipped others in advance of the publication of his “Heard on the Street” columns. As recently 2006, the S.E.C. brought charges against defendants who got an employee of a printing plant to steal pages from coming issues of Businessweek so they could trade on the companies discussed in it. The hacking is not all that different from those cases, except that these defendants did not owe a duty of trust and confidence to the news services or companies whose information they stole, unlike the reporter and the printer.

Microsoft Wants To Put Windows 10 On Every Connected Gadget

Microsoft just released Windows 10 IoT Core, a slimmed-down version of Windows 10 that runs on the $40 Raspberry Pi 2 and Intel's $140 MinnowBoard MAX—credit card-sized computer boards that makers use to prototype connected gadgets. A version certified for Arduino (the granddaddy of hardware hacker boards) is coming, says Tony Goodhew, a program manager in Microsoft's IoT Team. ...Microsoft is courting the garage developers of the connected future to build up support for its IoT platform. "We're presenting what we have to bring to the party," says Goodhew, "rather than trying to bring them to our party, which is what Microsoft has done in the past." Microsoft has partnered with Arduino and the Raspberry Pi foundation and become a Maker Faire sponsor, for instance.

Quote for the day:

“There are two kinds of leaders, cowboys and Shepherds. Cowboys drive and Shepherds lead.” -- John Paul Warren

August 18, 2015

Q2 DDoS attacks double in a year, says Akamai report

The largest DDoS attack of the quarter measured more than 240Gbps and lasted more than 13 hours, but the report said peak bandwidth is typically constrained to a one to two-hour window. ... That attack volume is capable of taking out tier 1 routers, such as those used by internet service providers (ISPs), the report said. DDoS attack activity set a new record in the quarter, up 132% compared with the same quarter in 2014 and up 7% on the previous quarter. Average peak attack bandwidth and volume increased slightly in the second quarter of 2015 compared with the previous quarter, but remained significantly lower than the peak averages observed in the second quarter of 2014, the report said.

Object Storage Solutions with CTERA for HP Helion

At its core, object storage is a scalable and efficient means of combating the challenges associated with the massive amounts of unstructured data enterprises generate every day. It is a viable and fast-growing technology that enables simple deployment of massive data stores. With CTERA and HP Helion, organizations can overcome adoption challenges and transform object storage into a wide variety of managed file services that enable organizations to sync, serve, protect and govern file-based data like never before. We’re going to be talking a lot more about how CTERA can be deployed in conjunction with HP Helion.

What is success for a scrum master?

In order to help Scrum Masters create their own approach we have collected many different views in the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast and have collected some of them here for you to read and refer to in the future. Below you will find a list of 15 tools and approaches that Scrum Masters all over the world use. Experienced Scrum Masters explain how they define and measure their own personal success as Scrum Masters, and share their lessons learned about how to achieve success. From how to deal with stakeholders, to how to improve your coaching skills, to how to help the team achieve a sustainable pace. The lessons shared below come from many years of experience and will help you improve your performance as a Scrum Master.

What CIOs can learn about security threats from 4 recent hacks

Keeping one step ahead of hackers is no easy task for IT security executives. There are so many ingenious hacker ploys, shady tricks and nefarious techniques to compromise your data, it might seem like no company could ever keep up. Cybercrime is clearly on the rise, and CIO have plenty of reasons to be anxious. Four recent high-profile hacks demonstrate that cybercriminals are breaching networks, stealing data and using social engineering to trick employees. We asked several security experts to weigh in on these cases, how they occurred and what CIOs should do to reduce the likelihood of a similar compromise. Hint: it’s more than just installing a new firewall and insisting that employees use antivirus apps.

10 more security startups to watch

The emergence of cybersecurity startups has continued unabated as entrepreneurs vie for corporate customers seeking new technologies to battle ever increasing and innovative attackers. The expertise of these new companies range from various improvements to encryption products to analyzing the wealth of security-incident data gathered from networks to gear that detects the potentially malicious wireless activity of Internet of Things devices. Based on the continued interest in these startups from venture capital investors, these companies will continue to proliferate. Here are 10 more security startups we are watching and why.

The more things change: Value creation, value capture, and the Internet of Things

The mere creation of information does not enable its effective use, however, and so we are well-served to capture the stages between action in the world and improved action in the world. In completing a circuit of the Value Loop, from action back to modified action, information iscommunicated from its location of generation to where it can be processed—perhaps in the case of the tennis racquet, to your smartphone. Information is aggregated over time or space in order to create data sets that can be analyzed in ways that generate prescriptions for action. After all, data from a single tennis stroke do not provide nearly as much value as data over a one-hour practice session, or as much motivation as comparing your stroke with those of relevant peers.

Android for Windows Mobile tools leaked on web

Microsoft has provided plug-in replacements for Google Play and Google Maps. Interestingly, developers also need to swap Google Mobile Ads for the Microsoft Advertising (Ads in Apps) service. If the app uses the Google Cloud Messaging service, according to the leaked Microsoft documentation, developers will need to configure their app server to use the Windows Notification Service instead. But the tool does much more, according to reports on the web. Because Windows Phone has Android running in a Linux virtual machine, Android apps can be ‘side-loaded’ onto Windows Phones, enabling end users to run certain apps that do not use Google Play Services. This is similar to how BlackBerry BB10.3 devices can run Android apps without modification.

How 'vendor bias' is killing your IT budget

Vendors usually have good intentions, but they still have a natural bias toward their own products. That can mean they're unlikely to recommend a competitor's product (often because they're unfamiliar with other products). They may also genuinely feel their own solutions will solve all your problems. Well-meaning or not, vendors simply don't have an objective view of what's possible beyond their limited scope of performance. In the worst case, trusting a vendor can be like asking the fox to design and build a better hen-house. ... What happens if the system doesn't work at all? You spend even more money trying to solve your problems "In any new system, there's at least a bottleneck or two," Gentry says. "You can never right-size every aspect of a system based solely on theory."

Companies hope cybersecurity experts in the boardroom can counter hacks

Data show that corporate boards have a long way to go. Just 11% of public-company boards queried this year reported a high-level understanding of cybersecurity, the National Assn. of Corporate Directors said. A review by the New York Stock Exchange and security firm Veracode found that two-thirds of board members questioned think their companies are ill-prepared for a cyberattack. Yet consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 30% of boards surveyed never talk about cybersecurity at all. That fact raises eyebrows. "There's some liability in not taking every measure you can to protect your clients, to protect your revenue stream," said Gary Matus, managing director at the executive recruiting agency RSR Partners. "To give people confidence, you have to be getting the best advice you can."

How college CIOs brace for back-to-school

It's a combination of value-added service and cost reduction that enterprise IT teams dream of. "What we're doing is actually improving service while at the same time reducing costs," says Haugabrook. "Our wireless project will provide students with more access, and Internet-based television is actually going to reduce our overall cable costs." ... Some of these data-driven decisions include transitioning to a 24-hour help desk to accommodate adult and online learners, as well as training overnight library staff to serve as IT support specialists for late-night queries. What's more, rather than hire full-time employees, VSU is hiring students part-time to function as help-desk technicians, enabling VSU to cut the overall IT budget by 5% this year while offering greater service, Haugabrook says.

Quote for the day:

"Vision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare." -- Japanese Proverb

August 17, 2015

Five Critical Layers of Next-Gen Data Center Automation and Orchestration

If you look at the modern data center and cloud landscape you’ll notice a lot more interconnectivity and new capabilities to dynamically pass resources. Some solutions even allow for cross-connects for the easier flow of data. The interesting piece here is how all of these technologies, which are currently influencing the end user and corporation, are directly pushing for the evolution of the modern data center through data center automation. Cloud computing, Big Data and IT consumerization have transformed the data center into the central hub for everything. Today, there are entire organizations that are born from a cloud model which resides within the data center.

Polyera Wove Band Boasts Flexible Display

At a basic level, a display is made up of two parts: The first is a frontplane, which is the layer that makes the image you see. The second is a backplane, which is an array of TFTs that control which pixels in the frontplane turn on and off. With Polyera Flexible TFTs, the backplane can be made flexible, making the full display flexible, in contrast to traditional display technologies where the backplane has previously been a constraint. "Most attempts to make flexible displays have relied on depositing traditional electronic materials, such as silicon, on plastic substrates," the company explains on its website. "This approach allows the creation of products with displays in a fixed curve, but the brittleness of these electronics layers makes them unsuitable for products which are dynamically flexible.

Key findings from the 2015 US State of Cybercrime Survey

It’s no wonder, then, that we found rising concern among the 500 US executives, security experts, and others from the public and private sectors who participated in the 2015 US State of Cybercrime Survey. In fact, 76% of respondents said they are more concerned about cybersecurity threats this year than in the previous 12 months, up from 59% the year before. Organizations must summon the vision, determination, skills, and resources to build a risk-based cybersecurity program that can quickly detect, respond to, and limit fast-moving threats. The US State of Cybercrime Survey is a collaborative effort with PwC, CSO, the CERT® Division of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and the U.S. Secret Service.

Target launches new beacon program using a system in need of change

This is the world we live in now. With each new evolution of The Internet of Things, we have to face the fact that every step forward will be faced with a step or two backwards, as those that can... do. Unfortunately, there is no getting around it. Hacks will happen. Should you create something of interest, something on a network, it will be found and it will be cracked. The more you advertise something, the more will know about it.And if you think there isn't a monetary gain to be had from hacking your system... think twice. Your swell new app or system has a user-base, that means there's a database of users that can be sold to the highest bidder.

Are comatose servers your next big IT headache?

To get a sense of the cost of the problem, think about how much you could save if you just turned off a third of the hardware that you manage – got rid of or re-used the licensing, unplugged the hardware, and liquidated the rest of it. It’s a problem with an enormous cost, and even if the study is half wrong, at 15 percent, that’s still a significant cost. Why does this happen? Fundamentally it comes down to the problem of not knowing what you have and what it is doing. It used to be a little easier to keep track of things because in order to roll out new servers, you had to requisition one, send a PO, receive it, inventory it and mark it, so at least you knew what type of silicon you had on your server closet racks. The operating system and software was another story, but at least you had a fighting chance.

For CIOs invested in digital transformation, think platform

It's the technology, the data, the people and the processes that hardwire some capability into your organization. One place where this was attempted in many companies was the implementation of an ERP and the associated transformation. Companies that had all of these processes were messy, disjointed and they suddenly said, 'We ought to have standard processes around finance, around supply chain.' So they built platforms. Some of them were really good -- this is why I've so enjoyed studying Lego; they went after their supply chain and fixed it. Campbell's Soup went after theirs; Nordstrom has an unbelievable supply chain platform.

3 security mistakes developers make with online services

One big danger with online source code comes from the data that is committed there. For example, if developers use a public repository to host the code of an internal application, they could be inadvertently exposing corporate infrastructure details on the internet. Sometimes configuration files refer to internet-facing test systems, user names, passwords, or hidden interfaces. Other intellectual property includes proprietary algorithms, undocumented APIs, or even production data that is being used as test data. Private keys (for SSH, for TLS web servers, for mobile app signing, and more) are found frequently in online repositories, where it is easy to search for them. Small to medium-size businesses are especially likely to leverage free or nearly-free online services this way.

Can big databases be kept both anonymous and useful?

This is a true dilemma. People want both perfect privacy and all the benefits of openness. But they cannot have both. The stripping of a few details as the only means of assuring anonymity, in a world choked with data exhaust, cannot work. Poorly anonymised data are only part of the problem. What may be worse is that there is no standard for anonymisation. Every American state, for example, has its own prescription for what constitutes an adequate standard. Worse still, devising a comprehensive standard may be impossible. Paul Ohm of Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, thinks that this is partly because the availability of new data constantly shifts the goalposts. “If we could pick an industry standard today, it would be obsolete in short order,” he says.

Hackers Find Infiltrating Government Computers is not Mission Impossible

“You would think the federal government would have better safeguards, but ultimately they are only as strong as their weakest employee,” says Daugherty, who has spoken at cybersecurity gatherings. “That boils down to knowledge and training.” Daugherty says security risks are one reason there are concerns about Hillary Clinton using a private server for her e-mail when she was secretary of state. “The potential for sensitive e-mails to be lost is the issue,” he says. “Whether they actually were or were not lost is not the issue, so Hillary's e-mail headache isn't going away anytime soon.” He suggests tips that both government agencies and private businesses need to remember to defend against hackers:

Optimization Analytics Comes to the Mass Market

As computing capabilities became increasingly affordable, companies could use more complex algorithms to handle ever more difficult optimization problems. For instance, the airline industry used it to determine how best to route aircraft between two cities and to staff flight crews. Not only can software find the best solution for scheduling these assets in advance, it also can rapidly re-optimize the solution when weather or mechanical issues force a change in how aircraft and crews are deployed. Airlines were also in the vanguard in the 1980s when they started using revenue management techniques. In this case, the optimization process was designed to enable established airlines to compete against low-cost startups.

Quote for the day:

"The Internet, mobile and social media have ushered in a new normal when it comes to customers' expectations." -- Paul Cho