Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

April 02, 2016

Five Technologies That Will Disrupt Healthcare By 2020

AI is consistently improving the approach and access to reliable and accurate medical image analysis with help from digital image processing, pattern recognition and machine-learning AI platforms. ... Innovative, automated patient guidance and engagement solutions, such as AI-enabled medication adherence to observe patient devotion by using advanced facial recognition and motion-sensing software, have started to automate one of the major healthcare processes of directly observed therapy (DOT). New entrants with similar solutions are expected to rapidly capture this sub-segment of the market.

Which country is most prepared for tech disruption?

While less than half of those surveyed felt their education was boring or old fashioned, young people were twice as likely to say so. Confidence in entering the workplace was again a feeling shared mostly among those in middle-income economies. ... The need for so-called "soft skills" was, in the minds of many, the most crucial aspect of the modern workplace. Skills such as communications, relationship-building and problem-solving were prioritized between 86% (Australia) and 79% (Brazil), compared with academic achievement, which scored only between 50% (South Africa) and 36% (Germany). Employers expectations, as perceived by those surveyed, were also focused on soft skills. While technical skills were important, time management, people management and active learning were all considered to be either more important or of equal importance.

Are healthcare CIOs being cut out of the analytics loop?

“The best organizations are taking more of a dyad approach,” Weaver observes. “The operator and the technologist are both at the table, having that conversation, so you’ve got the right technology support to support the operator. A lot of times, the operator may be running the analytic shop. But one of the things we’ve found is that while the CIO may not be running the analytics shop, the CIO is a critical partner. Because to do the analytics, you have to both collect the data and then pull it out of the operational data warehouse and put it into an analytic capability to be able to analyze it.” What happens in organizations where the analysts report to the operators and the CIO doesn’t have input? “Those places that have gone to the operator model find that begins to break if they don’t keep a consistent relationship with the technology folks,” he responds.

How Technology is Transforming Women-Owned Businesses in Africa

Technology is transforming the lives of women business owners in Africa as they are playing a significant role in the creation of jobs in their communities. Also, technology incubators dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs continue to populate the continent, and with increased access to the internet, entrepreneurs in emerging economies will continue to utilize various technological tools and resources to start, expand, and grow their businesses. Nigeria, in particular, leads the way in the number of women entrepreneurs that have developed. But, what else can be done to ensure that women are not just users of technological tools but also creators of them? How can we work to engage and increase accessibility in rural areas of the continent?

Is HyperContainer the Answer for Cloud Native Applications?

In a HyperContainer, the application process is still able to access what it needs: kernel and data. The difference is that the container does not run on the host kernel. Instead, every container gets its own, independent, guest kernel. By doing this, the application running inside is perfectly isolated from both other containers and the host. Performance wise, with the assistance of the super tiny guest kernel, a HyperContainer is able to finish booting in milliseconds (100-150ms), which is dramatically faster than a VM. Some may argue that this speed still lags behind a Linux container, but consider that an application usually takes longer to get started anyway meaning that, in practice, there is simply no difference.

The IT skills gap is a reality, but doesn’t have to be

Despite the popular conversation around big data in the business world, in 2014, the report notes that there was a decrease in the pay for these skills. According to the report, this can be attributed to the unrealistic expectations of business leaders, who reported being unsatisfied with the ROI on analytics and analytics professionals. Foote says that business leaders needed to temper their expectations around what big data and analytics could do for the business over time. And the attitude might have already started to shift, considering that as of 2015, the data shows that the market value of 74 noncertified and certified big data skills increased by six percent over the span of 12 months. One of the barrier around effective big data strategies at companies is about getting "decision makers to be more comfortable with data-driven decision making," according to the report.

Build this Raspberry Pi guardian robot and stave off intrusions!

Younger siblings -- gross! They sneak into your room and grime up your stuff. Sometimes you might also feel that way about your spouse. Babe, get your greasy mitts off my sunglasses. What you need is a sentinel, a guardian, a robot defender. This latest project comes to ZDNet via Dexter Industries, which makes cool components for DIY robotics builds. I have no affiliation to Dexter, but I dig what they do and I'm happy they've brought us a new build. Build and program this little GoPiGo to protect your wardrobe, your closet, or your whole room. Hide GoPiGo behind a closed door and when the door is opened it will attack, scaring intruders and snapping a picture as proof that your inner sanctum has been violated.

Why You Shouldn’t Enable “FIPS-compliant” Encryption on Windows

This setting does two things to Windows itself. It forces Windows and Windows services to use only FIPS-validated cryptography. For example, the Schannel service built into Windows won’t work with older SSL 2.0 and 3.0 protocols, and will require at least TLS 1.0 instead. Microsoft’s .NET framework will also block access to algorithms that aren’t FIPS-validated. The .NET framework offers several different algorithms for most cryptography algorithms, and not all of them have even been submitted for validation. As an example, Microsoft notes that there are three different versions of the SHA256 hashing algorithm in the .NET framework. The fastest one hasn’t been submitted for validation, but should be just as secure. So enabling FIPS mode will either break .NET applications that use the more efficient algorithm or force them to use the less efficient algorithm and be slower.

Is Artificial Intelligence Really Dangerous?

Ever since the beginning of time, we humans have had a desire for technological advancements and innovation. Through our vivid imaginations, we have been able to develop technologies that previously seemed impossible were just a part of our science fiction fantasies. Virtual reality, space tourism, self-driving cars and the much talked about artificial intelligence. Some of the most talented innovators have blurred the lines between fantasy and fiction for us. Artificial intelligence is now a very real prospect that companies are focusing on. Now, for those of you who are still new to this concept, Artificial intelligence is a field of science which focuses on how hardware and software components of a machine can exhibit intelligent behaviour. Instead of being fed information from the user himself, they learn over the course of time and become more intelligent.

How the New JSON Support Will Work in SQL Server 2016

"Someone might say -- this will not be fast enough, but we will see," Popovic said. "Built-in JSON parser is the fastest way to process JSON in database layer. You might use CLR type or CLR parsers as external assemblies, but this will not be better than the native code that parses JSON." Popovic said the JSON functionality will be rolled out over time in the SQL Server 2016 previews. SQL Server 2016 CTP2 is planned to include the ability to format and export data as JSON string, while SQL server 2016 CTP3 is expected to incorporate the ability to load JSON text in tables, extract values from JSON text, index properties in JSON text stored in columns, and more, he said. The SQL Server team will be publishing more details about the huge new release of SQL Server 2016 as the days count down to the first public preview, expected this summer.

Quote for the day:

“What high-performing companies should...create: A great place for great people to do great work.” -- Marilyn Carlson

March 31, 2016

Full Stack Testing: Balancing Unit and End-to-End Tests

At their core, tests make sure your application is doing what you intend it to do. They are an automated script to execute your code and check that it did what you expected. The better they are, the more you can rely on them to gate your deployments. Where your tests are weak, you either need a QA team or you ship buggy software (both mean your users get value at a much slower pace than is ideal). Where your tests are strong, you can ship confidently and quickly, without approvals or slow, manual processes like QA. You must also balance the future maintainability of the tests you write. Your application will change and thus so will your tests. Ideally, your tests only have to change proportionally to the change you are making in your software. If you are making a change in an error message, you don’t want to have to rewrite a lot of your test suite.

From Role-Based Access Control to Access Governance

Because the organization is fluid (e.g. reorganizations, mergers, etc.), the composition of the attributes (the payroll system) is in a constant state of change. The network landscape is also subject to change. And this means that the model that was set up has to be reviewed regularly. Validating the RBAC model is also known as re-certification. Re-certification checks whether the authorizations a person receives on the basis of his attributes are still appropriate within the organization. Alongside validating the RBAC model that has been set up, part of access governance is also to test the reality. This is called attestation. In attestation the organization itself is asked whether the assignment of certain authorizations to employees is in fact correct.

Coursera Announces First MOOC-Based Master’s Degree in Data Science

Data science has quickly become one of the most sought-after and highest-paid professionsin the United States, yet few highly ranked master’s programs exist today that are developed specifically for training data scientists, and none offer the scale of an open online course platform. The MCS-DS degree taps a whole new demographic of potential data scientists who are unable to take a traditional education path by reimagining graduate-level education as a “stackable” degree. Unlike other master’s degrees, students can test the waters of the MCS-DS degree with a shorter Specialization certificate program in data mining or cloud computing, earning a meaningful credential that can then fully transfer to the MCS-DS if they later decide that they want the full degree.

10 Ways Virtual Reality is Disrupting Industries

The concept of remodeling isn’t just limited to education or world history. It is creating ripples in the medical world as well. For quite some time now, Virtual Reality is being used to treat Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in war veterans. Using VR therapists recreate situations which the patient fears while they are still in a safe environment. Commonly known as exposure therapy, this helps soldiers in dealing with the stress endured on the during real-world war situations. USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies has been remodeling sites of Iraq and Afghanistan in virtual reality to help warriors combat PTSD. Another healing application of VR in medical is helping amputees deal with phantom pain by recreating their limbs.

Why Hospitals Are the Perfect Targets for Ransomware

The payoff for hackers can be huge. The FBI estimated in 2014 that the extortionists behind the CryptoLocker strain of ransomware swindled some $27 million in just six months out of people whose data they took hostage. And ransomware attackers have upped the ante in recent months with attacks that encrypt not just files on an individual computer but on core servers, to prevent an entire organization from accessing shared files and databases. ... “You don’t have to lock an entire network,” Sjouwerman says. “You just need to find where are the critical files in a network—what servers are serving up the millions of files that most workers use…. And you only need to lock maybe two or three file servers to essentially block the whole network.”

IBM Data Chief on Strategy: Training Engineers for Cognitive Systems

Data is playing an ever-growing role in the business world, with machine learning software and artificial intelligence systems like IBM’s Watson leading the way. IBM’s Bhandari says that IBM is focused on training more data scientists and engineers in analytics systems, such as open-source computing framework Apache Spark, because it believes the amount of human talent has not kept pace with advances in analytics. Simply put, there are not enough people who can take action on insight that is provided by today’s data-analytics software, like the video footage of the Magic-Heat games did for the in-game stats, he says. IBM’s corporate strategy in the current market is on cognitive systems, such as Watson, Bhandari says.

Senator Wyden Lays Out New 'Compact For Privacy & Security In The Digital Age'

Here’s the problem. A few decades ago, courts began ruling that if you provide information to a third party, like your bank or your phone company, you are no longer keeping it private, and it is no longer protected under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. There is a huge, glaring problem with that logic. When you share your information with a single private company, that is not the same thing as making it public. Your phone company may have records of who you call, and your bank may have records of how you spend your money, but your contract with them will have rules for when and how they are allowed to share that information. They are not allowed to just disclose it freely. This is true in the digital world as well. When I post a handsome new profile picture on Facebook, or send out a tweet to tell people that I’m holding a town hall in Oregon,

Enterprise Mobility is Going Beyond “Mobile First” Approach. Are You Ready?

The future is likely to become even more connected, thanks to internet of things and M2M (machine-to-machine) communications. This means, businesses now need to go beyond ‘mobile first’ planning. By this we mean you need to develop a strategy that puts your business at the forefront of mobility. You need to go beyond just creating mobile applications and services when it comes to deploying mobile technologies. While these efforts were tactical enough to address the need for people to remain connected 24*7 across various devices, they won’t suffice to make your business ready for the mobile journey of the future. Today, we see more and more businesses are investing resources to create a mobile strategy that can successfully transform the enterprise, changing the way they run their business.

5 Dev Tools For Better Code Security

Information security is of paramount importance these days, and there is no better place to start securing systems and data than in the software development process itself. Lapses in coding can leave systems vulnerable to attackers. But examining thousands and thousands of lines of code for a wide array of potential weaknesses is no easy task. Thankfully, a variety of tools are emerging to help ensure the security of your code. With the help of capabilities such as static analysis, these tools not only flag possible issues but enforce security a priority in the development process. Following are five tools aimed at analyzing your code for security flaws, ranging from open source to commercial offerings, available as on-premises solutions or services in the cloud.

Why CISOs Need to Build Better Business Cases For Data Security

The overall budget for security-related costs is often within decentralized healthcare organizations and resides with a number of different clinical, business and technology areas. Typically, the easy business case to make for security investments comes from improving the organization’s overall security posture. However, CISOs will have to redesign this undemanding path toward an approach for making business cases in terms executives can appreciate and directly connect to the organization’s top strategy goals and objectives. Making more effective business cases can help to gain investment dollars and increased control for a budget not always under a CISO’s direct management.

Quote for the day:

"There are many elements to a campaign. Leadership is number one. Everything else is number two." -- Bertolt Brecht

March 30, 2016

Cyber criminals use Microsoft PowerShell in ransomware attacks

Traditional ransomware variants typically install malicious files on the system which, in some instances, can be easier to detect. Although the code is simple, PowerWare is a novel approach to ransomware, the researchers said, reflecting a growing trend of malware authors thinking outside the box in delivering ransomware. Carbon Black researchers found that PowerWare is delivered through a macro-enabled Microsoft Word document that launches two instances of PowerShell. One instance downloads the ransomware script and the other takes the script as input to run the malicious code to encrypt files on the target system and demand payment for releasing them.

Train your IT team for endurance

Work is the ultimate endurance event. While a triathlete might compete in a 5- to 12-hour event, the average career is measured in decades. Consider your IT organization for a moment. If it's like the majority, it's been conditioned around sprinting. A firefight or development sprint results in a fury of activity, the organizational equivalent of an athlete spiking her heartbeat to the max and tenaciously hanging there until it's physically impossible to sustain that level of effort. Like the athlete, after the sprint the team usually hits a wall and performance crashes down— employees even become physically affected by the workload. Contrast this to the team that has trained and measured around the productivity they can produce at sustainable activity levels. There's a quiet energy and diligence, and this team can make a strategic sprint or two when the time comes, without depleting themselves and falling apart.

Q&A: Database infrastructure must match modern apps

As a standard SQL solution, the way you build an application is not significantly different from how you build a system against other relational database management systems. The difference is that it scales. If you're running Oracle on a single machine, and you reach the capacity of a SQL machine, you switch to Oracle RAC, and that gets you some more performance. But when that gets exhausted, you're done. With NuoDB, you can take an intuitive database application design, and rather than changing the application to handle more scalability, you just plug in more computers.

Is outsourcing IT worth the compliance risk?

“Regulators have taken a deeper interest in outsourcing services that have an impact on either the regulatory posture of the organization or on cyber security and cyber-crime,” explains Bala Pandalangat, president and CEO of Centre for Outsourcing Research & Education (CORE), an organization that provides outsourcing advice and training based in Toronto. CORE’s membership includes Deloitte, IBM, Xerox, large banks, universities and law firms such as Torys LLP. “We see several common mistakes when it comes to outsourcing arrangements,” says Pandalangat. “The number one mistake is viewing risk management is an after-thought. Many deals emphasize the financial benefit of outsourcing at the expense of risk management. If risk management is not built into the contract, costly adjustments may be required to address that concern.”

NASA Software Audit Reveals Budgetary Black Hole

The audit warns that delays with such software designed for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket could affect the ability to react to unexpected issues during launch operations, and could impact the launch schedule for the unmanned Orion system, which is due to lift off in 2018. The first exploration mission would allow the space agency to use the lunar vicinity as a proving ground to test technologies farther from Earth, and demonstrate it can get to a stable orbit in the area of space near the moon in order to support sending humans to deep space. The root of the budgetary issues appears to result from NASA's June 2006 decision to integrate multiple products or parts of products rather than develop software in-house or buy an off-the-shelf product.

Apple’s New Challenge: Learning How the U.S. Cracked Its iPhone

The challenges start with the lack of information about the method that the law enforcement authorities, with the aid of a third party, used to break into the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, an attacker in the San Bernardino rampage last year. Federal officials have refused to identify the person, or organization, who helped crack the device, and have declined to specify the procedure used to open the iPhone. ... Making matters trickier, Apple’s security operation has been in flux. The operation was reorganized late last year. A manager who had been responsible for handling most of the government’s data extraction requests left the team to work in a different part of the company, according to four current and former Apple employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the changes.

Prep your smartphone for emergency situations

Another obvious recommendation, but one that can save you a lot of grief: keep your device in tip-top shape. Remove all unnecessary apps which might drain the battery. Keep a couple of spare batteries (if your device allows you the option of swapping these out). Make sure the hardware performs well; replace damaged screens, buttons and other elements which may be malfunctioning. And by all means keep it as fully charged as possible. I use car chargers, desk chargers and of course a bedside charger so at least two-thirds of the time during a normal day (and sometimes 100% depending on my schedule) I have access to power.

The triumphant, magnificent, and unexpected return of PC gaming

What makes the PC even more compelling right now is that the VR revolution has finally started. Just this week, the Oculus Rift debuted for PC with a host of new games that you can’t play on any of the consoles. (I will have a full report on that device soon.) That system requires at least an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and at least a NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290 GPU. The consoles just don’t have enough horsepower to make VR look realistic or compelling, despite what you may have heard. My theory is that PC gamers are smart enough to know this. They’ve seen the writing on the wall, and it says Virtual Reality

IT Security Threat to Intensify in Next Two Years

The report, Threat Horizons 2018, says the ability of organizations to protect IT is progressively being weakened. Businesses and society, for that matter, are becoming more reliant on complex new technologies to function, which intensifies the threat landscape, the report contends. "We are having to be a little bit more, perhaps, critical of the way in which we look at our use of technology, and that's what you're beginning to see with some of the predictions we're coming out with now," Steve Durbin, managing director of the Information Security Forum, says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. "Let's bear in mind: These predictions are really trying to put some extra weaponry into the armory for the security professionals so we can anticipate some of the challenges that we're going to be seeing."

Quote for the day:

"Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art." -- Peter Drucker

March 29, 2016

How mobile browser is making a comeback and challenging apps

India has 1 billion mobile phone users. Almost 90 per cent users have a phone that costs below Rs 8,000. These have low memory and slow processors. But most apps are heavy—more than 5 MB and often exceeding 8 MB. Some of the furniture apps are 30 MB in size. Computing resources to download and run apps is limited on low end phones. Top end phones that can accommodate these apps cost a bomb. Browsers have no such problems. They offer content and functionalities across categories. ... "The cost of developing a browser site is one-third of an app. Besides, chance of an app malfunctioning or crashing is higher than that of a mobile site."

Invokedynamic - Java’s Secret Weapon

The features main goal was to create a bytecode to handle a new type of method dispatch - that essentially allows application-level code to determine which method a call will execute, and to do so only when the call is about to execute. This allows language and framework writers to support much more dynamic programming styles than the Java platform previously provided. The intent is that user code determines dispatch at runtime using the method handles API whilst not suffering the performance penalties and security problems associated with reflection. In fact, the stated aim of invokedynamic is to be as fast as regular method dispatch (invokevirtual) once the feature has matured sufficiently.

How to Review and Test Backup Procedures to Ensure Data Restoration

It’s important to test often enough as well as to test in a quality sort of fashion. But how often is often enough? What is and is not quality testing? “The factors that should affect how often you test backup and restore capabilities fall under Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and include regulatory constraints, data retention periods / data criticality, risk assessment, policy, audit preparation, and strategic planning,” says Adam Gordon, CSO, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Of South Florida. Testing frequency realities are another matter as some companies only find out whether backups work when they need them, and the success or failure of the backups and the restore operation in the middle of a crisis is the only test of their adequacy. This is certainly not often enough.

Banks and fintech firms can and must collaborate

"We recognise API as an unstoppable force," Mr Mohanty, a former Citibank banker, said. “There's no other way to do innovation. If (banks) don't do it, I don't know how they will survive.” He added that countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan have mapped out policies in relation to API, and the MAS is keen to “partner with industry players to make it work” in Singapore. However, Mr Mohanty noted that there’s a gap in terms of how much regulation can drive change, and businesses will ultimately have to take the lead. Ong Whee Teck, partner of Technology Consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers, agreed: "The days are here to collaborate, otherwise fintech is here to eat your lunch. Change will require a grassroots-style uprising."

For IT, climate change means preparing for disaster

Interest in disaster recovery planning increased after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but "many pulled back because of the cost of maintaining two centers," and paying for idle equipment, said Phil Goodwin, a research director at IDC. Cloud-based services are changing that. The fastest growing segment of disaster recovery is "disaster recovery as a service," said Goodwin. There may be 150 or more firms providing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Taco, Inc., an HVAC manufacturing company in Rhode Island, maintains servers in a back-up facility run by a disaster services provider. But by the end of this year, the company hopes to complete a move to a disaster recovery as a service provider.

Benefits and Risks of Knowledge Process Outsourcing

If you are a business owner, you already know that there is no endeavour without risk. Risk is omnipresent. It needs to be identified, assessed and mitigated with a proper plan always. The risks of KPO entail key talent retention. Internal information could get lost if KPO staff is working remotely. The service providing individual might not match the company culture or there are communication difficulties. KPO is usually very time-consuming and there is often no immediate result. Depending on the nature of your business there might be more or less risks involved in working with a KPO company, but these risks are very transparent, they can be accounted for and there can be an operational design, which allows for an efficient cooperation for the benefit of all involved parties and individuals.

Linux at 25: Why It Flourished While Others Fizzled

It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Linux, which celebrates its 25th birthday later this year, has so profoundly challenged the norms of software development. It showed programmers everywhere that a different world was possible—a world where they could share code openly, collaborate informally, and make a decent living, even if they gave away the chief product of their labor for free. The advantages of working this way have since become obvious to even the most hard-headed of business leaders, with most large software-development companies now sharing at least some of the fruits of their programmers’ efforts openly. How did Linux end up producing such radical change? And why did other free-software activists’ attempts to build bigger and seemingly better systems than Linux fail to achieve as much momentum?

Autonomic platforms

Over time, IT departments became saddled with manual processes, cumbersome one-size-fits-all software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies. Or they developed “over-the-wall engineering” mind-sets in which individuals fulfill their own obligations with little understanding or concern about the needs of downstream teams. This operational baggage has fueled tension between IT’s development group, which pushes for speed and experimentation with new features and tools, and its operations organization, which prizes stability, performance, and predictable maintenance. To combat organizational inefficiency as well as any discord that has arisen among various parts of the IT value chain, many organizations are implementing DevOps a new way of organizing and focusing various teams.

Petya Ransomware Overwrites MBRs, Locking Users Out of Their Computers

It's hard enough for non-technical users to deal with ransomware infections: understanding public-key cryptography, connecting to the Tor anonymity network and paying with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. A new malicious program now makes it even more difficult by completely locking victims out of their computers. The new Petya ransomware overwrites the master boot record (MBR) of the affected PCs, leaving their operating systems in an unbootable state, researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro said in a blog post. The MBR is the code stored in the first sectors of a hard disk drive. It contains information about the disk's partitions and launches the operating system's boot loader. Without a proper MBR, the computer doesn't know which partitions contain an OS and how to start it.

High Load Trading Transaction Processing with Reveno CQRS/Event Sourcing Framework

Reveno is a new JVM based lock-free transaction processing framework based on CQRS and event-sourcing patterns. Although it’s a simple and powerful tool it does not compromise on performance. All transactions are persisted to read-only journals, and the latest state of the domain model can be restored by simply replaying these events in sequence. All runtime operations are performed in-memory so throughput can reach an order of millions of transactions per second, and mean latency in the order of microseconds. But with all of this power Reveno is still a general purpose framework, as it covers a variety of use cases with rich sets of engine configurations. For example, you can vary the durability configuration, from very relaxed

Quote for the day:

"A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller." -- Paul Klee

March 28, 2016

8 Reasons To Consider Insights-As-A-Service

Insights-as-a-Service providers are quick to mention their ability to improve business outcomes because that's the entire point of insights. For example,Capgemini provides Data-as-a-Service, Analytics-as-a-Service, and Insights-as-a-Service options. Data-as-a-Service provides raw data upon which analytical applications are built, Analytics-as-a-Service provides outputs of analyses, and Insights-as-a-Service is linked to tangible outcomes such as revenue increase or cost savings. "I consider them a progression in terms of sophistication and value, and fundamentally what the '-as-a-Service' unit of measure is," said Goutham Beliappa, a leader in the Business Information Management Data Integration and Reporting Practice for Capgemini North America, in an interview.

How Advanced Analytics Is Changing B2B Buyer Expectations

As information continues to fuel and be fueled by new online channels, we most often hear about the impact this has on the B2C sales world. But as anyone in the B2B space will tell you, this evolution is far reaching and certainly relevant. Similar to B2C buyers, B2B buyers feel empowered by their access to data. As a result of the rise of e-commerce in B2B and the general availability of data on the Internet, B2B pricing and product information is significantly easier to find and compare than before. This is enabling buyers to be armed with more information going into a price negotiation than was previously possible. This also means that buyers now expect companies to have relevant and convenient product and pricing information on their websites.

Data lake governance: A big data do or die

Data lakes or data hubs -- storage repositories and processing systems that can ingest data without compromising the data structure -- have become synonymous with modern data architecture and big data management. The upside to the data lake is that it doesn't require a rigid schema or manipulation of the data to ingest it, making it easy for businesses to collect data of all shapes and sizes. The harder part for CIOs and senior IT leaders is maintaining order once the data arrives. Without an upfront schema imposed on the data, data lake governance, including metadata management, play vital roles in keeping the data lake pristine, according to experts.

Trump's Incomprehensible 'Cyber' Policy: 'Make Cyber Great Again'

First off, we’re so obsolete in cyber. We’re the ones that sort of were very much involved with the creation, but we’re so obsolete, we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries, already. And we don’t know who’s doing what. We don’t know who’s got the power, who’s got that capability, some people say it’s China, some people say it’s Russia. But certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber. But as you say, you can take out, you can take out, you can make countries nonfunctioning with a strong use of cyber. I don’t think we’re there. I don’t think we’re as advanced as other countries are, and I think you probably would agree with that. I don’t think we’re advanced, I think we’re going backwards in so many different ways.

Aetna CISO talks about threat intelligence and enterprise risk management

Third party governance programs must evolve to offer more continuous methods for risk assessment and management vs. one and done annual on-site assessments. More and more services are offered through cloud providers that host sensitive information and determining online vulnerabilities on a 24 x 7 basis will become more of the norm for any enterprise interested in managing third-party risk. The other fundamental change in third-party risk is a migration from compliance driven assessments (compliance to a standard) to a risk-driven assessment where risks are identified and managed. Adherence to a standard or framework based on standard practices is better than nothing but not sufficient to manage risk effectively given the evolution of cloud computing.

Is digital experience management the new social business?

Probably the key question to ask at this point is do these two overarching digital frameworks play well side-by-side or do they need to be integrated for companies to get the fullest benefits of both? Digital/customer experience is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of realized products and services to support it, so until recently it's been hard to say. But with the maturity of both approaches, I'm now beginning to see digital engagement practitioners have to routinely deal with both frameworks. The result? They find in general that CEM platforms tend to underserve social business needs, while social business frameworks and products often neglect many key aspects of digital experience. This lack of integration leads to more work, lower impact, and a fragmented approach to digital, which is what we were trying to resolve in the first place.

9 Cost-Effective and Critical Security Tips for Startups

When big names fall victim to data breaches, its big news, making smaller companies believe they aren’t likely to be a target. However, according to Greg Sullivan, CEO of Global Velocity, smaller companies should be on the offensive. “The issue is that SMBs wrongly assume that their size or small influence does not merit attention from hackers or do not educate themselves about potential exploits in their infrastructure,” he says. “While SMBs are not as big as companies like Target and Home Depot, they are the majority of victims at the hands of cyber thieves seeking easy targets. The Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 62 percent of breaches impacted smaller organizations, likely a conservative figure since not all small organizations are reporting breaches.”

IPSec Policies

IPSec encrypts data information contained in IP datagrams through encapsulation to provide data integrity, data confidentiality, data origin authentication, and replay protection. The two main IPSec components that are installed when you install IPSec are the IPSec Policy Agent and the IPSec driver. The IPSec Policy Agent is a service running on a Windows Server 2003 computer that accesses IPSec policy information. The IPSec Policy Agent accesses the IPSec policy information in the local Windows registry or in Active Directory. The IPSec Policy Agent then passes this information to the IPSec driver. The IPSec driver performs a number of operations to enable secure network communications such as initiating IKE communication, creating IPSec packets, encrypts data, and calculates hashes.

The Role of a Data Scientist in 2016

Whilst the role of a data scientist crosses over with more conventional data analysis positions, there are some stark differences. A data analyst or architect can extract information from large sets of data. Yet they are bound by the SQL queries and analytics packages used to slice these datasets. Through an advanced knowledge of machine learning and programming/engineering, data scientists can manipulate data at their own will uncovering deeper insight. They are not bound by these programmes. Whilst your typical data analyst looks to the past and what’s happened, a data scientist must go beyond this and look to the future. Through application of advanced statistics and complex data modelling they must uncover patterns and make future predictions.

Insight: The disruptive side of disruptive innovation

Nothing can stop innovation and as long as this technology brings value then it is here to stay. Traditional ojek may eventually have to become app-based or at least adapt to using their cellphones to get customers rather than wait passively at their posts for passengers. Long-time drivers of established meter taxi companies are not that easy to adapt, with their livelihoods having been tied to a regulated system for so long. The democratized application of Uber is actually unfair competition for them, so it is easy to understand their — and especially the companies’ owners’ — resistance to this innovation. In the end, it would be a new government regulation that decides the fate of Uber and that of public transportation as a whole.

Quote for the day:

"Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal" -- Alexander Hamilton