Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 14, 2016

Big Data Goes Mainstream: What Now?

Organizations today are often pursuing those goals by implementing big data environments that coexist with the data warehouse, according to Bean. Organizations are currently looking at what information is better suited to what environment. "There are certain things that a data warehouse is suited for, like data compliance" or operational reporting. "Big data is more about discovery environments and looking for patterns … Right now there is a value to both environments." Another factor that comes into play between the data warehouse environment and the big data initiatives is cost. "One of the original premises of big data was it was much more cost-effective than traditional data environments," Bean said. "And that will likely be the case."

Microsoft R Server Is Free for Developers and Students

A Developer Edition of Microsoft R Server, "with all the features of the commercial version," will be available to coders as a free download. It will also be included in the Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine, a Windows Server 2012-based virtual machine that includes tools for data scientists and developers. Microsoft is also making Microsoft R Server available free for students under the company's DreamSpark technology in education program. "Providing even more students with access to Microsoft R Server is a pretty big deal," wrote Microsoft Program Manager Joseph Rickert. "Microsoft R Server extends the reach of R into big data, distributed processing environments by providing a framework for manipulating large data sets time so that all of the data being analyzed does not have to simultaneously fit into memory."

Big Data Still Requires Humans To Make Meaningful Connections

Perhaps it’s because we put so much faith into technology to solve our problems. We have been led to believe big data is going to help businesses make smarter and more informed decisions. In healthcare, it will help our doctors and medical professionals make better diagnoses and find the most appropriate treatments. In sports, it will help our favorite teams pick the best players. In government, it will open up information and lead us to the transparency promised land where no corrupt government official can hide. And it will help root out those people who are planning to do us harm. As we learned in the recent horrific attacks in Paris, sometimes it doesn’t matter how much information we collect.

Truly Wireless Headphones Arrive, But With a Few Strings Attached

It works for keeping the ears in sync. The Dash, sold online and coming soon to shops, kept going even when I wore it in the shower. Bragi says even when you are swimming, the waterproof earbuds work, playing music stored directly on them. The audio, again, sounded fine for working out, although even a bit more compressed than the Earin buds. Bragi says it will continue to fine-tune audio quality. The Dash can last more than three hours on a single charge, which it also gets from a companion battery case. Each Dash bud is roughly double the size of the Earin, but still lays flat inside my ear. (Silicone sleeves of multiple sizes help fit different-size ears.) I almost never felt like the Dash would fall out, whether I was running or doing my best impression of Animal from the Muppets.

Hope in a Glove for Parkinson’s Patients

GyroGlove’s design is simple. It uses a miniature, dynamically adjustable gyroscope, which sits on the back of the hand, within a plastic casing attached to the glove’s material. When the device is switched on, the battery-powered gyroscope whirs to life. Its orientation is adjusted by a precession hinge and turntable, both controlled by a small circuit board, thereby pushing back against the wearer’s movements as the gyroscope tries to right itself. While the initial prototypes of the device still require refinements to size and noise, Alison McGregor, professor of musculoskeletal biodynamics at Imperial College, who has been a mentor to the team, says the device “holds great promise and could have a significant impact on users’ quality of life.”

Emerging: DataOps and three tips for getting there

CIOs know the typical wave of adoption -- technology or otherwise -- starts with early adopters. But even before the early adopters, CIOs will need to find their innovators -- employees who are, essentially, change agents. "In order to build a culture, we needed to identify not only the people who have technical skills or the business skills, but those who also are fearless. They want to go out to an organization and actually change things -- they want to change the way government works," she said. ... Before Jin arrived, a basic dashboard was designed for Mayor Martin Walsh,the first of its kind for the city. A year later, the mayor's dashboard has not only become more a sophisticated administration window into Boston doings, it also acts as a constituent-facing information portal.

How CIOs will refine digital transformation in 2016

“The traditional IT security defense is completely broken,” says Russell. “Most CIOs and senior leadership and boards are realizing that when you wake up every day and see another breach of some kind … the existing model does not work.” He’s well into a four-year IT security roadmap, which includes adding vArmour software to identify and flag anomalous traffic flowing across the company’s computer network. It’s designed to find the type of threat that hit Target, in which an intruder crawled into the network through a third-party vendor and began moving data. “That’s a huge transition from saying ‘we have a barrier nobody can get through.’” The tech has also provides fodder for conversation with his board, which wants details on what he is doing to buttress corporate defense.

People are the biggest source of vulnerability

People are the biggest point of vulnerability in any organization and the endpoint is where they interact with whatever an attacker is after: intellectual property, credentials, cyber ransom, etc. Further, people are responsible for the policies and procedures that are in place at the enterprise, whether forced upon them by regulatory bodies or voluntarily for proper security hygiene. Securing the endpoint would be less difficult if we were willing to accept policies and procedures that could help reduce the attack surface. But, no enterprise, in practice, wants to put employees through having separate systems for outside/inside network access. Employees want to and will use their corporate equipment for personal things: checking email, syncing music with their phones, and engaging others on social networks.

Automakers tap mobile software experts in search of premium cache

"Younger customers demand the latest connectivity features, and German premium automakers need to develop new offerings in the digital arena which cater to this," said Thilo Koslowski, vice president of the automotive practice at technology market research firm Gartner. BMW's Chicago team helped to develop 'Bumper Detect' a new system unveiled last week which uses BMW's onboard camera and sensors to photograph potential thieves or vandals. "The car can take photographs of another vehicle which may have left a dent in your parked car, and send pictures to your mobile device," Robertson said. The Bavarian automaker already has several software development centres in Munich and elsewhere and said it will continue to recruit staff in 2016 to help "the advancement of new technologies, including the ever-increasing scale of digitalization."

3 Lessons From The Graveyard of Fintech Start-Ups

Every tech field involves legal complexities. While big corporations have their own lawyers to maneuver complicated legal regulations, start-ups are on their own. And it’s a big deal. While some financial technologies may be far less intrusive, some could face intense quagmires. GoCardless, a UK-based online direct debit provider, has been sponsored by RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) and handles $1 billion of transactions a year. Even their founder, Hiroki Takeuchi, has noted the difficulty in understanding regulations, as well as penetrating the bank-owned financial infrastructure. “To get access, you need to set up some sort of arrangement with a bank that moves at a glacial pace.” They didn’t go it alone, and it took a lot of work to work with the famed glacial pace of traditional banks.

Quote for the day:

"Respect for people is the cornerstone of communication and networking." -- @susanroane

January 13, 2016

Board Governance: Higher Expectations, but Better Practices?

Although Banks have made significant progress toward meeting regulatory expectations in this area, necessary changes have not yet been implemented at several institutions. For example, 30% of Banks have not formalized in their board charters a requirement for the risk committee to approve the Bank’s risk governance framework, as required under EPS. A similar 30% are yet to require their board (or the risk committee) to perform an annual self-assessment, as expected by the OCC. Finally, about 20% of Banks have not yet formalized the requirement that their board (or the risk committee) annually approve the institution’s risk appetite statement (a key component of the risk governance framework), as required by the OCC.

Data Privacy Reform Is Wreaking Havoc

From a legislative viewpoint, the matter of “where data resides” is critical as these new data privacy rules roll out. The Ovum research underscores that when it comes to the physical location of data, there is uncertainty and confusion. Until now, a key benefit of the cloud was that businesses no longer needed to concern themselves with the physical location of their data. It was stored off-site, for all to share, as needed. Now, with the European Union (EU), Israel and the United States beefing up regulations with the goal of stopping the flood of data leaks and stolen information, businesses must shift their approach to the cloud in a fundamental way. Suddenly, the location controlling the physical path of data matters.

4 Ways To Be A More Resilient Leader

Why resiliency? Last year I wrote about employer brand and candidate experience. Subsequent conversations with friends, family and clients made me realize organizations, and employees, and people, need more than a strong brand and the intent to engage and create a positive experience for employees and potential talent. We need resilient organizations with flexible, resourceful leaders to create the most productive work culture for people. Most organizations make a plan and figure that will get them where they need to go. But much of the time things don’t go according to plan, and people lose heart and focus. Employees start asking the same questions every day, betraying their unease and uncertainty.

Learn any of these 16 programming languages and you'll always have a job

"Software is eating the world," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously declared. Someone has to write that software. Why not you? There are thousands of programming languages, but some are far more popular than others. When a company goes out to find new programming talent, they're looking for people familiar with the languages and systems they already use - even as new languages like Apple Swift start to make a splash. Here are the programming languages you should learn if you always want to have a job, as suggested by the popular TIOBE Index.

The best web browser to replace obsolete Internet Explorer is...

The easiest way to get a new, supported browser is to simply upgrade to IE 11. You can do that in two ways: Download the installer from Microsoft--be wary of getting it from third-party websites---and simply install it. Or, you can simply update your system. Either way works perfectly well whether you're moving from IE 8, 9 or 10 to 11. ... Chrome, 501, barely edged out Opera, 500 for the top spot. Firefox took third with 448. And, once more eating the dust of the others, came IE with 336. The numbers make it obvious. When you replace IE 8, 9 or 10 on Windows 7, Chrome is easily the best choice. Opera, which has become the forgotten browser, also deserves some attention. Firefox, which has had more than its fair share of troubles, doesn't appear to be a good choice.

The Internet of Things is wasted without risk-taking

Productive data analysis requires an open mind. While it is undoubtedly important to improve business efficiency and utilise data for maximising profitability, the greatest innovations are typically born out of business opportunities created in completely new markets or sectors. The most lucrative jackpots are ideas that cannot be foreseen before data analysis. Let us discuss a few examples. Elevator companies provide services to large masses of people on a daily basis, which means they possess a large amount of data on the movements of their users. This data could be utilised in planning parking facilities, developing restaurant services or ensuring security. Another example could be a crane company with a hundred active cranes operating in the middle of a large city.

2015 was a tipping point for six technologies

Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020. By then, the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Web access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit. This means we will see another 3 billion people come on line. This will be particularly transformative for the developing world. Soon, everyone will have access to the ocean of knowledge on the Internet. They’ll be able to learn about scientific advances as they happen. Social media will enable billions of people to share their experiences and help one another. Farmers will be able learn how to improve crop yields. And those are but a few examples.

Global telecommunications: 2016 outlook

Wireless spectrum is essential to all wireless networks for over-the-air transmission of analog and digital signals including voice, video and data. The value of spectrum in the FCC’s latest auction rose significantly above prior auctions and the secondary market, underscoring the need for more of this resource. ... Revenue growth for Europe’s telecom industry in 2016 will depend largely on the ability to stimulate and monetize demand for data amid a tepid economic recovery in Europe and regulatory uncertainty. Fixed-mobile convergence will set the tone of competition with varying levels of promotional activity across countries. Potential consolidation in Italy and the U.K., even with stricter remedy requirements, support pricing power. Capital spending will moderate as 4G networks near completion.

For the First Time, More Are Mobile-Banking Than Going to a Branch

For the first time ever, there are more of you than people who actually walked into a branch in 2015, according to a new survey by Javelin Strategy & Research, a unit of financial-industry research firm Greenwich Associates. Last year, roughly 30% of adults in the U.S. used a mobile banking service weekly, while just 24% availed themselves of a physical branch service as often, Javelin’s survey of 3,100 people found. That’s the first time in the history of the survey that mobile users (and that means just smartphones and tablets, not via desktop computers) outpaced branch users, Javelin said. In 2015, one in ten consumers used mobile banking for the first time, or roughly 25 million people. Since 2010 the number of smartphone bankers has doubled, while the number of people using a tablet has jumped nearly 10 times, Javelin found.

Quote for the day:

"Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." -- George B. Shaw

January 12, 2016

List of data breaches and cyber attacks in 2015 – over 480 million leaked records

There have been breaches of highly sensitive data (including that of children), targeted attacks on government agencies such as the US’s OPM and Germany’s Bundestag, and an alarming number of well-orchestrated DDoS attacks. Money has been stolen, data has been swiped and lives have been ruined. However, I must not fail to mention the fantastic work law enforcement agencies around the world have been putting in to bring justice down on the cyber criminals causing havoc this year. As Stuart Winter-Tear recently called it, 2015 has been the year of collaboration, and we can only hope to see the same in 2016.

Malware on the Smart TV?

So in this case, it’s not a new type of malware specifically targeting Smart TVs, but a common threat to all internet users. There are also reports that this scam has hit users on Apple MacBooks; and since it runs in the browser, it can run on Smart TVs and even on smartphones. These kinds of threats often get combined with exploits and may take advantage of vulnerabilities in the browser, Flash Player or Java. If successful, they may install additional malware on the machine or change DNS settings of your system or home router which may lead to similar symptoms. Such behaviour could not be observed in this case, since they malicious pages have been removed already. Keep in mind, there might be vulnerabilities in the software on your TV! Therefore it’s important to check if your device is up to date. Make sure you installed the latest updates for your Smart TV!

Red Hat's Ansible 2.0 brings new power to devops

Blocks also provide a way to perform exception handling, so that if something goes wrong during the course of a block, it can be handled. Existing scrips that don't use blocks will run as-is, but legacy scripts could only implement the same kind of functionality by way of a lot of boilerplate code. A new addition called strategies controls how playbooks execute, with the default for existing scripts being a "linear" strategy -- e.g., all hosts have to finish one task before any of them can begin the next one. A "serial" strategy, meanwhile, ensures one group of hosts finishes its work before another group can begin, and another strategy named "free" allows all hosts to run independently of each other. Strategies are not hard-wired into Ansible, either; they can be defined by plug-ins.

Will LiFi Take Big Data And The Internet Of Things To A New Level?

LiFi is a category of Visible Light Communication; an LED light flickers at speeds undetectable to the naked eye to transmit data — a bit like high tech morse code. In fact, scientists have demonstrated in a lab that they can transmit information at as much as 224 gigabits per second, the equivalent of 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second. In an office setting, they were able to achieve speeds up to 100 times faster than average WiFi speeds. The LED lights require so little energy, they can be powered by a standard ethernet cord. Inventor Harald Haas has also suggested that the smart lights could be powered by solar cells charging batteries. In addition, LiFi does not create electromagnetic interference the way WiFi does, meaning it could have important applications in sensitive locations like healthcare facilities.

8 Things I Learned About SDx in 2015

This is, of course, the concept known as virtualization, whereby applications are detached or disaggregated from the underlying hardware. The most important aspect of this is on the development level, because it has ushered in the era of agile development in which software can be designed, deployed, moved, and updated on the fly. ... Bubbles have value in themselves even though there is going to be pain and carnage along the way. Even as a herd of startups is culled, the bubble can accelerate innovation in specific markets. What’s interesting about the orginal Internet bubble, which resulted in a crash and many failed companies, is that it created the largest economic engine in the world — and some of the world’s most valuable companies, including Amazon and Google. The same thing is happening in SDx and cloud-based security.

Tech innovations that will transform healthcare in the next five years

Healthcare providers are no strangers to the impact of technology on their operations. Over the past several years, for example, the move to electronic health records, though painful, has helped organizations develop the IT capabilities to pursue other innovations, with an eye toward better outcomes and improved operational efficiency. While many technology advancements hold tremendous potential to transform the industry, their timing and viability are unclear, particularly since promising technologies must often go through years of testing to obtain approval for use. Industry regulations, such as safeguarding patient information, can further cloud the timeline.

NAS vs object: Which one for large volumes of unstructured data?

Object storage enables enterprises and service providers to manage multi-petabyte secondary storage with relative ease. This does not directly compete with traditional file and block storage for serving frequently-accessed data and transactional workloads. In addition, when we refer to storage performance we usually think in terms of speed, latency and throughput in the datacentre. This is very different to the cloudy world of distributed applications and clients, where mobile devices typically access data over long distances and from widely disparate locations. The second differentiator is geographic scale. In the distributed world we need distributed storage performance and throughput.

Exposing the Lucene Library as a Microservice with Baratine

The ability to expose an existing application or library as a web service without any code modifications is a most appealing concept. Using Baratine, an open-source framework for building a platform of loosely coupled microservices, this can be accomplished in two steps: Implement a service portion (SOA) then; and Implement a client library for communication. Using this approach, Baratine can transform an existing library or application into a standalone web service. The Baratine services will communicate with the existing library, and the Baratine clients will service requests from the outside world. ... The Apache Foundation describes Lucene as: “a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.”

Scale-Out Storage and the Virtualized Data Center

Scale-out, as opposed to scale up, has the promise of allowing a solution to grow with the number of hosts in the cluster, but very often we see solutions that fail to live up to this promise. Why is scale-out hard? Well, there are multiple reasons why scale-out is hard and although the specifics of each solution are different, the common theme is that multiple hosts means multiple copies of data, and multiple copies means they need to be kept coherent or consistent. The price of keeping the copies coherent, henceforth referred to as doing “cache coherency”, goes up as you traverse down the following list: A. Immutable objects B. Mutable objects. Single Reader, Single Writer (Single-RW) C. Mutable objects. Multiple Readers, Multiple Writers (Multi-RW)

Quote for the day:

"The secret to success is doing the stuff other people won't do & doing it for a really long time." -- John Jantsch

January 11, 2016

Redmonk analysts on best navigating the tricky path to DevOps adoption

It's the idea that Hilton International or Marriott would be worrying about Airbnb. They weren’t thinking like that. Or transport companies around the world asking what the impact of Uber is. We've all heard that software is eating the world, but what that basically says is that the threats are real. We used to be in an environment where, if you were a bank, you just looked at your four peer banks and thought that as long as they don’t have too much of an advantage, we're okay. Now they're saying that we're a bank and we're competing with Google and Facebook. Actually, the tolerance for stability is a little bit lower than it was. I had a very interesting conversation with a retailer recently. They had talked about the different goals that organizations have.

A disaster recovery/business continuity plan for the data breach age

The need to manage and protect both business and personal data (as clearly differentiated from the software) has never been more important. A disaster recovery/business continuity plan that does not account for our dependence on data puts the enterprise, its employees and customers at risk. ...

A good disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan is not an IT plan, it is a business plan that has significant IT components. As discussed above, more and more focus needs to be placed upon datarecovery beyond ensuring that programs and processes are returned to operational status. The plan should be scenario-based and aligned to the likelihood of varying levels and types of risks as specified by documented business impact analyses and business risk assessments.

Why customer is not always right

There are two fatal flaws in this model, both having to do with managing expectations. First, clients need to understand that they are unlikely to get every deliverable without some compromise – particularly in custom software, where nobody knows exactly what’s involved until the project is more than half done. Second, the project lead on the consultant side must actively manage expectations during every client meeting. If the project lead on the client side is weak – technically or politically – s/he will not successfully propagate the realities of prioritization and negotiation to executives in the client organization. This means the project is in trouble before it starts … and, worse, the trouble can be totally invisible to the client until it’s way too late.

How tech giants spread open source programming love

Programming languages and technologies that were developed by industry and Internet giants – specifically to meet the unique challenges they faced operating at massive scale – have been open sourced and are now being adopted by regular-sized enterprises for everyday use. Part of the reason for this is a natural technology trickle-down effect, according to Mark Driver, a research director at Gartner. "Today's leading edge super high tech is tomorrow’s standard product," he says. "Also, large companies (like Google and Facebook) understand the collaborative nature of open computing and the dynamics that drive the Internet. So it's natural that they share these technologies and strengthen the industry around them."

Six Transformations From 2015 That Will Reshape The World

Looking at the list of finalists for the Crunchies, you could get the impression that the greatest advances of 2015 were sharing and delivery apps, software platforms, and pencils. Yes, these are cool. But much bigger things happened last year. A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. And this is just the beginning. Starting in 2016, a wider range of technologies will begin to reach their tipping points. Here are the six amazing transformations we just saw.

Britain is on the verge of an IT crisis

This shortage will boil over in the coming years as a generation of IT workers, who built the systems and databases that still power critical functions, begin to retire. This is especially worrying in finance, where large institutions, which have repeatedly merged and sold off parts of their businesses, have back-end systems that have been hastily thrown together. As those that created them leave the workforce, disasters will be more difficult and take longer to recover from. Companies have responded to the problems with hiring IT workers by outsourcing more work. But having done this, says Tate, many have made poor decisions, found contractors to be inadequate, and moved operations back inside. The alternative is simply to pay more for the best talent, but a swell in demand across the board is making this increasingly expensive.

3 Guiding Principles for Innovation in Managed Services

We simplify what has become complicated, we create dashboards of the automation and single pane of glass displays of the coordinators, and we start the cycle over again. It sure seems a little reversed to me. Am I issuing a wake-up call to our industry? Absolutely! I have begun to initiate some brain-storming sessions with colleagues that challenge the status quo. Our technology is now using Fully Automated Storage Tiering, multiple alerting consolidation engines, automatic load balancing, pooled resource rebalancing, and the list goes on and on. This is fantastic and exciting beyond belief to talk about, explore, and work with these technologies. However, I am involved in services. We are the pilots of the automation, and we must aviate, navigate and communicate our way through the technology hierarchy.

The Dark Side of The Wearables

As wearable devices make their way into the workplace and corporate networks, they bring a host of security and privacy challenges for IT departments and increase the amount of data that data brokers have to sell about an individual. Jeff Jenkins, chief operating officer and co-founder of APX Labs, talked about the security and privacy of wearables during a panel interview with Tech Pro Research at CES 2015. Because wearable devices are designed to be small and portable, Jenkins said, "you have to make sure you're thinking security first and you're thinking about the information that's being generated by them. You have situations where it's no longer just personal data that may be exposed or compromised, but also potentially operational data, that could be sensitive in nature."

The Emerging Data Design: Bitemporal Data

Simply defined, bitemporal data means storing current and historical data, corrected and adjusted data, all together in the same place. Bitemporal means you are using two time dimensions simultaneously – one to represent business versions and one for corrections. For example, let’s say you have a database table of customers; in a bitemporal world, you would store changes (versions) of the customer’s data, over time, as well as any corrections, as new rows in the same table. Customer data changes include attributes like the customer’s name, address or buying preferences. Corrections (some people like to call it adjustments) represent restatements of data that people or systems make to record the right value. Human typing errors or software errors create data that may get corrected.

DDoS: 4 Attack Trends to Watch in 2016

Most businesses are ill-prepared for DDoS attacks, which is why it costs them so much to recover, Meyerrose says. The cost of recovering from a DDoS attack can be more than $50,000 for small businesses, he notes, quoting data from security firm Kaspersky Labs. That cost includes business lost to downtime and technology expenses and investments associated with site recovery. So what can be done to defend against the growing DDoS threat? "My main strategy for defense would be making sure I could quickly detect and block all types of DDoS attacks, e.g. application or network layer, and be able to quickly redirect my users to a backup duplicate, albeit streamlined, site to keep my business running without interruption," Litan says.

Quote for the day:

"Once we rid ourselves of traditional thinking we can get on with creating the future." -- James Bertrand

January 10, 2016

Open Source as a Driver of Internet of Things

The zero entry barrier provided by the use of open source, with several toolkits, libraries, and open source hardware like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, is the foundation for it turning up in small devices sprinkled all over the globe, from home security to energy management systems, from automobile telematics to health monitors. Because open source helps lower the cost of the device itself, companies can now experiment and stitch together solutions that would otherwise have been ignored because they would have required upfront purchasing of expensive licenses for development tools and environments, specific libraries and software components. Open source is a very effective way to ride the IoT wave at high speed while keeping the risks and costs to do so under control.

Cisco's global cloud projections may blow your mind

Annual global cloud IP traffic is expected to reach 8.6 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 2.1 ZB per year in 2014. In an interesting glimpse into how new technologies are helping drive efficiencies in spite of this massive increase in traffic, networking technologies such as SDN and NFV are expected to streamline data center traffic flows such that the traffic volumes reaching the highest tier (core) of the data center may fall below 10.4 ZB per year, and lower data center tiers could carry over 40 ZB of traffic per year. In terms of how this traffic looks on a regional basis, perhaps unsurprisingly North America will have the highest cloud traffic volume (3.6 ZB) by 2019, followed by Asia Pacific (2.3 ZB) and Western Europe (1.5 ZB). North America will also have the highest data center traffic volume (4.5 ZB) by 2019, followed by Asia Pacific (2.7 ZB) and Western Europe (1.8 ZB).

What makes a great company? Let’s talk information flow

The flow of information between employees is important across all levels and titles. Too often, executive teams hold intelligence close to their chest in fear of having competitive knowledge or financial earnings exposed outside of the company. We want to lead by example — and transparency and trust are huge components. With that goal in mind, we host a Datameer Radio session each month so everyone can get an update on the company and participate in a candid Q&A with the executive team. We’ve found that not only do our employees respect the confidentiality of the information that is shared, but also knowing what is going on strengthens their commitment to being a part of helping us grow. It’s clear that the workplace is in need of disruption with new models of motivation to drive inspiration and enhance well-being.

Internet Of Things Extends Business' Ability To Sense And Respond

Call it fallout from the Google effect, he explains. “One of the things that Google and search has done for us is it has infinitely expanded the capacity of the human memory,” says Hoover. “I don’t have to memorize all the facts in the world. I can go out and look them up and find it if I want to learn about reinforcement learning. It’s expanded my brain, my memory to nearly infinite capacity.” By analogy, the billions of sensors across the planet is expanding our awareness of our surrounding. The Internet of Things is “about Googling reality,” Hoover explains. “I see things, I hear things, I sense the world around me. To sense something at the time it occurs, it no longer has to be near my body. I want to understand the state of pollution in Beijing; I go and find it on the internet.

Dutch government says no to 'encryption backdoors'

The Netherlands began reviewing its policies after the recent Paris terrorist attacks. But this week it said "restrictive" measures would put citizens at risk. Encryption is a way of protecting communications or data so that it is incomprehensible without the correct passcode or key. Advocates say it protects users by preventing criminals and spies from prying into private conversations. But security agencies have said they struggled to bypass encrypted messaging platforms used by groups such as so-called Islamic State to plan attacks. "We are not some kind of maniacs who are ideologues against encryption," FBI director James Comey said in November: "But we have a problem that encryption is crashing into public safety and we have to figure out, as people who care about both, how to resolve it."

Big Data Security and Compliance Issues in the Cloud

It’s a quandary. Businesses want to be able to conduct deep, flexible analytics on complete data sets. That’s the essence of big data. You don’t want to omit any data that might contribute to finding business-facing insights. You want the cloud for flexibility and economics. But, you also don’t want to run afoul of compliance regimens or increase your exposure to security risks. What can you do? Don’t worry. As I said, it can be worked out. Getting on top of public cloud big data security and compliance challenges takes effort on two fronts. First, there has to be a coherent, disciplined set of data governance policies at work in the cloud. Platforms also matter. The two work together, with the platform enabling the definition and enforcement of governance policies.

Symantec Adds Deep Learning to Anti-Malware Tools to Detect Zero-Days

Until recently, deep learning has been locked away in the software development labs. A few companies have realized that they can spot malware by its components and its behavior to ferret out most zero-day attacks before they have a chance to cause damage. Because of this, deep learning is now being deployed on the cyber-security battleground. ... Symantec has their sights set on bigger goals in the enterprise. The next target will be enterprise email, especially cloud-based email. "We process a lot of the world's email," Gardner said. "A lot of attacks enter the enterprise through email. They're insidious." He said that by attacking company email systems, cyber-criminals are able to seize critical information and, in addition, able to steal a lot of money through phishing schemes that install malware on company networks.

The DIFA Framework for evaluating data science projects

A situation that many CIOs or data science departments will face today is that the list of possible analytics projects is sheer endless. The range of project candidates usually begins with analyzing customers and ends somewhere at utilizing social media data. Needless to say that not all project candidates will make sense from a business and especially ROI perspective. Also, some projects will run into dead ends because some fundamental bits turn out to be missing. Even though experimentation and some vagueness about eventual monetary success in the context of data science projects is normal, there are some hard facts that heavily influence the success of a data science project. These facts are structured in the DIFA framework which is explained below.

Tracking Cloud Services: An Essential Security Step

Not knowing who's responsible within an enterprise for managing cloud serviceclouds contracts could result in the inventorying of cloud services falling through the cracks. "The decentralized procurement model of cloud creates situations where individuals and business units may use a cloud service outside of the purview of the central IT organization," says Jim Reavis, CEO of the Cloud Security Alliance, a not-for-profit that promotes use of cloud security best practices. Confusion about who is responsible for cloud services contracts within the enterprise could lead to the failure to inventory each agreement. "Organizations fail to inventory their cloud services and other cloud-accessible devices because they fail to appreciate that cloud computing is not a technology decision," says Kevin Jackson, founder of the cloud computing consultancy GovCloud Network.

How Digital Disruptors use Data Science

Digital disruptors are fast and relentless. They are constantly releasing new functionality. They try things - they experiment. In order to do this, digital disruptors need a feedback loop. They use the data from their customers’ use of their product to get fast and accurate feedback on how these products are being used. Lets look at examples of how they do this using data science. On race days, Nascar analyses all the tweets and fan site activity relating to the race. It uses data science to bucket this human interaction data into topics, and for each topic it automatically determines sentiment. It then addresses any concerns thru information on its fan site, information at the event, or feeds to it broadcast partner, Fox Broadcasting.

Quote for the day:

Technological change is not additive; it's ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything. -- Neil Postman