SSD Prices Plummet Again Close in on HDDs
the market for SSDs with PCIe interfaces, which are used by laptop makers such as Apple to attach flash directly to a motherboard, is expected to grow at the highest annual growth rate ever over the next six years. "This growth can be attributed to the advantages of PCIe, which include high speed, enhanced performance scaling, and detailed error detection and reporting," the report said. "Thus, the demand for SSDs with PCIe interface is expected to increase from the client as well as enterprise end users." Samsung, according to TrendForce, will continue to dominate the SSD market this year because of a price advantage it has with TLC-based SSDs using 3D-NAND flash, which Samsung markets as V-NAND. V-NAND stacks silicon cells up to 48-layers high to increase density, thereby reducing cost.
What Happens to Stolen, Sensitive Data?
Bitglass, a data protection company, ran the experiment and released findings in its report "Where's Your Data?" Bitglass researchers created a digital identity for an employee of a fictitious retail bank, a Web portal for the fake bank and a Google Drive account complete with real credit card data. They pretended that the fake employee's Google Drive credentials were stolen via a larger phishing campaign. They leaked those "phished" Google Apps credentials to the Dark Web and tracked activity in the fake employee's online accounts. Hackers did not know that Google Drive activities were being monitored for a month and that files were embedded with Bitglass watermarks. Here's what happened next.
CEOs force CIOs, CMOs into digital transformation bunker
"CEOs are telling CIOs and CMOs to put in place a new foundation for digital business," Cochrane says. "The CEO tells the CMO I want a strategy for customer experience and he tells the CIO to make it happen." IT has to enable marketing with tools and extend those tools to every customer touch point. That requires CIOs to account for every customer interaction with the corporate brand across the call center, physical stores, online and mobile devices. ... Cochrane says that while the CMO has traditionally owned the customer experience with little influence from the CIOs, that needs to change because of the vast amount of information streaming into businesses from social media, as well as from various Internet-connected devices. With the data surface broadening so much, CMOs need help from the CIO.
Graphene sheets for capturing and storing energy
In terms of optics, the problem is when you think of a material, as it gets thinner, it absorbs less light. So, when you go below 50 nanometers, you have a transparent layer. You might have a layer that's 50 nanometers thin, but to the outside world, it looks transparent, because it's too thin to absorb light. But you're trying to marry light with electronic circuits. And as soon as your devices get smaller and smaller, it gets invisible. So now, you have to boost the thickness of the optical layer if you want to operate in the wavelength we're comfortable with. In this program, we're making this leap. We're creating surface structures that absorb light.
Redesigning Wi-Fi may let devices communicate more easily
Most conceptions of the internet of things assume the chips in sofas, wallets, fridges and so on will use technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to communicate with each other—either directly, over short ranges, or via a base-station connected to the outside world, over longer ones. For a conventional chip to broadcast a Wi-Fi signal requires two things. First, it must generate a narrow-band carrier wave. Then, it must impress upon this wave a digital signal that a receiver can interpret. Following Moore’s law, the components responsible for doing the impressing have become ever more efficient over the past couple of decades. Those generating the carrier wave, however, have not.
Data Backup and Business Continuity
As information across all industries and businesses becomes increasingly digitized, the importance of ensuring that this information is continuously accessible has never been greater. And as storage technology has evolved from floppy disks to CD-ROMs, DVDs, portable hard drives and offsite cloud backup, the expectation of 24x7 uptime and constant availability certainly hasn't slowed down. Then there's the matter of compliance and regulatory restrictions, which have become increasingly strict as both IT and business best practices have progressed.HIPAA, HITECH, PCI compliance, and myriad related requirements around data capture, storage, transfer and processing have forced backup vendors and technologies to shapeshift both point solutions and integrated software and services.
Bimodal IT is only harmful when oversimplified
Although the bimodal concept can be polarizing, I believe much of the blowback originates from assumptions made due to an unfortunate choice of name, reflexive distaste for analyst buzzwords and particularly the term’s originator, the analyst firm so many love to hate. A common construction takes bimodal to mean bipolar, with IT segregated into two separate, but unequal entities: Mode 1 where all the stuffy IT old-timers live out their days caring for decaying databases and molding mainframes, versus Mode 2 where all the cool kids play with the latest toys and work unshackled from IT bureaucracy and processes. If that’s your view, bimodal is a recipe for disaster: a warring, dysfunctional IT organization.
Using Blockchain Technology in Crowdfunding
Blockchain technology isn’t perfect yet; some might say it’s not even ready for prime time. Today, the primary drawback is how long it takes to authenticate transactions. A transaction today in Bitcoin takes about 10 minutes to clear, and Bitcoin is a microscopic market compared to, say, credit card transactions. Indeed, the Bitcoin community is engaged in a civil war as to how, or even whether, to change the technology to speed up transactions. But you can understand why blockchain technology is attracting so much interest from government and private industry. For example, the music industry is plagued by uncertainty over ownership of rights. The title industry exists because of uncertainty as to the ownership of real estate. Credit card issuers spend tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars processing and authenticating transactions.
How doctors are turning smartphones into surgeries with video appointments
“We have a good insight into patient needs and demands. We understand there are limits and you can’t treat everybody and that’s why we have a filter system.” But the healthcare technology sector is not just dealing with problems around primary care. The future of this sector could see technology that monitors how patients use medication — containers designed with a mechanism which sends a signal to both doctor and patient confirming that tablets have been taken. Remote sensoring devices, which a patient wears on a troublesome joint, could analyse the problem and lead to a quicker, more accurate diagnosis. And sensors that monitor blood sugar or chemical levels could automatically drive responses to balance those levels.
Are We Winning the Cyber War? A Look at the State of Cybersecurity
As you might expect, the experience of attacks on a daily, weekly or monthly basis were reported less frequently. An alarming trend is that 54 percent of study participants did not know how frequently they experience cyber-incidents. While 73 percent believed they were able to detect and to respond to incidents, 42 percent felt they could only do so for simple attacks. In an era of increasingly sophisticated and persistent attacks, being able to identify and respond to attacks is imperative. Board and executive concern and support for cyber activities are increasing. Eighty-two percent of security executives and practitioners participating reported that boards are concerned or very concerned about cybersecurity. This is not surprising given the higher level of awareness about cyber in general and the number of high profile attacks that we have recently seen.
Quote for the day:
“Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.” -- Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
