Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 05, 2016

The barbell effect of machine learning

One of machine learning’s most lasting areas of impact will be to democratize basic intelligence through the commoditization of an increasingly sophisticated set of semantic and analytic services, most of which will be offered for free, enabling step-function changes in software capabilities. These services today include image recognition, translation and natural language processing and will ultimately include more advanced forms of interpretation and reasoning. Software will become smarter, more anticipatory and more personalized, and we will increasingly be able to access it through whatever interface we prefer – chat, voice, mobile application, web, or others yet to be developed. Beneficiaries will include technology developers and users of all kinds.

Unstructured Data Miners Chase Silver with Deep Learning

There’s a tremendous amount of value hidden in unstructured data, including social media posts, news stories, legal documents, and other free sources of data. But as indico CEO Slater Victoroff explains, it can be very difficult to get useful insights out of these sources, such as performing sentiment analyses. “We found the majority of people are either not doing anything with unstructured data, or not doing nearly enough with it,” Victoroff tells Datanami. “The main barrier to sentiment analysis is not making a better model. It’s getting more data.” Indico claims it has come up with a better way to analyze unstructured data. While much of how the platform works is secret, key breakthroughs involve the combination of silver-standard corpora training data, as well as the use of transfer learning techniques to accelerate the training of its recurrent neural network (RNN) model.

Tech Conferences: Where the Conversation Has Been and Where It Should Go

Security conferences are an important way to educate and engage an audience beyond the security professional and hackers of the world who attend. The most important conversation we can have is that cybersecurity can no longer be an aftermarket consideration. It needs to be built into every new network and infrastructure system. For example, the idea of collective problem solving would call for “crowdsourcing” information from beyond just cybersecurity professionals and would focus on the collective knowledge of individuals with diverse skill sets to identify and address where existing technologies are lacking and vulnerable. These conferences strive to foster community building among different groups of people working on the same problems. They create an open space where ideas can be shared, people can connect, and collaboration can flourish, ultimately leading to better technology and stronger systems.

Machine Learning Is Redefining The Enterprise In 2016

The good news for businesses is that all the data they have been saving for years can now be turned into a competitive advantage and lead to strategic goals being accomplished. Revenue teams are using machine learning to optimize promotions, compensation and rebates drive the desired behavior across selling channels. Predicting propensity to buy across all channels, making personalized recommendations to customers, forecasting long-term customer loyalty and anticipating potential credit risks of suppliers and buyers are Figure 1 provides an overview of machine learning applications by industry.

Why stop at DevOps? How about AllOps?

We fully embrace this mindset but we think it is too limiting. Why stop at providing seamless integration and automation for just the developers? After all, there are many other teams that surround and interact with IT operations. Why not let them do the same thing—use their tools of choice to interact with the operations environment in a fully integrated and automated manner? For instance, the virtualization admin may want to provision new infrastructure, update existing infrastructure, or see how virtual resources, such as networks, are mapped to the physical infrastructure. Rather than requiring two teams, two tools, and manual processes, shouldn’t the virtualization admin expect a VirtOps environment? Shouldn’t they be able to work in their preferred virtualization tool and still interact with the physical infrastructure in an integrated and automated way?

A Self Motivated Tester in an Agile World

We have to strongly concentrate on the ‘Agile Manifesto’ which says to focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. As testers, there is a need to work as members of the team and to engage with others within the team, regardless of titles. The role of a tester is to test. However, if you see a task that is stuck and needs immediate attention, even though it’s part of the developer's job, you should take up the task. The title and role of every individual working should have less impact in any matter. Regular and timely communication is yet another aspect. Use the daily scrum meeting as the best platform to communicate effectively with the entire team. We have to look at incorporating some best practices so that our efforts as an Agile tester are really effective.

EU's market watchdog to take deeper look at blockchain

"It is too early at this stage to form a definite opinion on whether DLT (blockchain) will be able to address these issues in an efficient way," the watchdog said in a statement. "ESMA stresses that firms willing to use DLT (blockchain) should be mindful of the existing regulatory framework." The watchdog also published a discussion paper asking for more views on blockchain's risks and benefits to help it decide whether new rules are needed for securities markets. "ESMA believes that the DLT will need to overcome a number of possible challenges and shortcomings before its benefits can be reaped," the watchdog said. "Some of these challenges are related to the technology itself. Others are mainly related to possible governance, privacy and regulatory issues." Regulators are trying to work out what is really new about blockchain in case it takes off.

Confluent Platform 3.0 Supports Kafka Streams for Real-Time Data Processing

Kafka Streams is a lightweight solution to real-time processing of data which is useful in use cases such as fraud and security monitoring, Internet of Things (IoT) operations and machine monitoring. It provides a new, native streaming development environment for Kafka. Developers will be able to leverage this library for building distributed stream processing applications using Kafka. Kafka covers the messaging and transport of data, Kafka Streams covers the processing of the data. Kafka Streams also supports stateful and stateless processing as well as distributed fault tolerant processing of data. No dedicated cluster, message translation layer, or external dependencies are required to use Kafka Streams. It processes one event at a time instead of as micro-batches of messages. It also allows for late arrival of data and windowing with out-of-order data.

Artificial intelligence is changing SEO faster than you think

Google’s RankBrain is in the camp of the Connectionists. Connectionists believe that all our knowledge is encoded in the connections between neurons in our brain. And RankBrain’s particular strategy is what experts in the field call a back propagation technique, rebranded as “deep learning.” Connectionists claim this strategy is capable of learning anything from raw data, and therefore is also capable of ultimately automating all knowledge discovery. Google apparently believes this, too. On January 26th, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, which was, essentially, a back propagation shop. So when we talk about RankBrain, we now can tell people it is comprised of one particular technique on ANI. Now that we have that out of the way, just how much is this field progressing?

Zimbabwe: IT Governance Integral Part of Corporate Governance

IT governance now constitutes a key component of every company's strategic plan and consequently it has become a standing agenda item at board meetings. There are also other factors that have catapulted focus on IT governance. IT systems and e-commerce, despite their advantages have also brought with them a lot of operational risks which organisations need to mitigate. Cybercrime has become a very big challenge to organisations with computer database hacking, data corruption, manipulation and loss, phasing, identity theft, card fraud, virtual money laundering etc becoming more rampant globally. This has produced disastrous consequences not only to organisations, their customers and stakeholders, but also to global economies and stability. The rise in cybercrime has placed organisations in "panic mode" catalysing them to invest more in risk mitigation measures as part of their IT governance framework.

Quote for the day:

"Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it." -- Richard Bach

June 04, 2016

Building Data Systems: What Do You Need?

Data engineers must be as conscious of the specifics of the physical infrastructure as that of the applications themselves. Though modern frameworks and platforms make the process of writing code faster and more accessible, the scale in terms of data volume, velocity, and variety of modern data processing means that conceptually abstracting away the scheduling and distribution of computation is difficult. Put another way, engineers need to understand the mechanics of how the data will processed, even when using frameworks and platforms. SSD vs. disk, attached storage or not, how much memory, how many cores, etc. are decisions that data engineers have to make in order to design the best solution for the targeted data and workloads. All of this means reducing friction between developer and infrastructure deployment is imperative.

4 Reasons Why Bitcoin Represents A New Asset Class

“It’s governed by a protocol run by a distributed network of computers,” says White. “That’s in stark contrast to fiat currencies, which are dictated by government monetary policy. Bitcoin is really just math, code, run by individuals on their computers all over the world to ensure the credibility of it, and on the opposite end, you have fiat governed by a small group of individuals.” A look at the growth in the supply compared to gold and the U.S. monetary base shows in a glance how differently Bitcoin, which will be capped at 21 million bitcoins and whose release is halved every four years until the maximum number of bitcoins is reached, functions.

Three important security upgrades to Android N

If you're a Chromebook user, you're already accustomed to that little arrow icon popping up to say that updates are ready to install. This is very much like the old Windows update. Although that Windows update caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, and issues with Chrome OS updates rarely appear. The same holds true with Android. This is important because so many users neglect to bother checking for updates. To that end, their devices will go with unpatched security issues for months. With the new update system, those patches will be applied in the background, in a sort of isolated instance of the operating system...running completely isolated from the working instance. During this time, all apps will be optimized (again, in the background). Once all apps are optimized, the operating system will seamlessly transition to the updated version.

Human Error Biggest Risk To Health IT

"Nearly all past successful network penetrations can be traced to one or more human errors that allowed the adversary to gain access to and, in some cases, exploit mission-critical information," Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Martin Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the memo. "Raising the level of individual human performance in cybersecurity provides tremendous leverage in defending the [DoD's networks]." Medina's agency, which sits at the intersection of the military and healthcare and arenas, presents a target-rich environment for cyber criminals and other groups of digital adversaries. But the health sector in general has become a favorite target of hackers for a rather logical reason.

Myspace, Tumblr megabreaches put spotlight on security knowledge gap

"Board members, business [members] really don't understand the threat," he said at the recent MIT CIO Sloan Symposium -- this despite security now garnering more and more attention from the board and the C-suite. "They really understand that the level of sophistication, the amount of individuals that are involved in cyberattacks and their skill set have increased substantially in the last five to seven years," said Morrison, ... . Defense Intelligence Agency before joining State Street in 2013. One hopeful note: Security ignorance is not bliss for the majority of security professionals. According to the CompTIA survey, the 53% of security staff respondents who reported gaps in their departments' security skills said they wanted to be more informed in the latest cyberthreats, and about 40% feel they need to get better at educating end users, or that they need to know more about modern security technology.

Cities Are Ahead in the IoT Game, but States Need to Catch Up

“Government agencies that adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward the IoT are unlikely to develop the expertise or engender the trust needed to effectively and efficiently deliver services in this new reality and to reassure citizens concerned about how this new technology will affect them…public sector leaders ready to start tapping into the potential of IoT technology can begin by identifying specific, pressing mission challenges, and then analyze how more or better information, real-time analysis, or automated actions might help address them.” CIOs can also work at the enterprise level with agency heads or CIOs to develop standardization, avoiding silos and individual systems. Incompatible systems for IoT and data management will slow down the effectiveness and benefits of IoT for state government. CIOs should not understate the dollar value of IoT on the state budget.

Borderless Cyber Europe 2016 to emphasize the importance of threat intelligence sharing

We in the security industry might like to believe that attackers operate in a dog-eat-dog world. But that’s simply not the case. They are more than willing to exchange information. It just needs to be under the right circumstances. “Digital threats have moved sophisticated attacks techniques down into the realm of organized crime,” observes Peter Allor, a security strategist at IBM. “Whether by purchasing others’ tools or simply by telling one another, computer criminals are constantly sharing information with one another about how threats work and how they can modify a technique to accomplish a specific purpose.” In the process, they are also contributing to the collective threat intelligence knowledgebase, which empowers every bad actor to conduct more sophisticated attacks in the future.

How Six Sigma Promotes a Culture of Innovation

Taken to its extremes, one would have to dispense entirely with the scientific method of inquiry to buy into the critique, at least with respect to some of the stages of the creative process and the R&D role. “It’s an oversimplification to suggest that Six Sigma always has a chilling effect on innovation because of its emphasis on metrics and method and conformation to standards, thereby shutting down the timid who are afraid of the error part of trial-and-error, or those responsible for the cost justification of it,” said Mike DiLeo, president of Management & Strategy Institute, a provider of online, self-paced certification courses in Six Sigma. That the Six Sigma culture, because of its emphasis on planning and measurement, is incompatible with innovation isn’t necessarily the case. It wouldn’t be Six Sigma without an emphasis on metrics, so it’s fair to acknowledge that some businesses,

How Ransomware Affects Hospital Data Security

While hospital ransomware attacks are not a new issue, healthcare is likely becoming a more prominent target because of the sensitive information that organizations in the industry hold. The apparent increase in healthcare ransomware issues though, has not gone unnoticed, and stakeholders are beginning to take steps to ensure that covered entities and business associates of all sizes have the necessary tools to keep data secure. For example, the California Senate Public Safety Committee passed ransomware legislation earlier this year that outlaws the online act and specifies how the crime should be prosecuted. The legislation amends existing law that “establishes various crimes relating to computer services and systems” and defines extortion as “obtaining the property of another, with his or her consent, induced by a wrongful use of force or fear.”

The rise of SDDC and the future of enterprise IT

According to Gartner's Morency, the initial value provided by the SDDC is threefold: more automation, more agility, and more flexibility. With less manual effort, organizations can use their employees more efficiently and greater agility helps operations respond more quickly to business requests. An additional and often-overlooked use case for SDDC is in improving data center resiliency, said Morency. SDDC also helps to "provide the means by which the in-house enterprise IT staff can begin to configure, provision, [and] activate compute and storage resources at a level that's, maybe not the same, but much more competitive, much closer to what the large public cloud providers can offer," Morency added.

Quote for the day:

"We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles." -- James Earl Carter, Jr.

June 03, 2016

Security concerns rising for Internet of Things devices

The good news is that the larger IoT companies like Belkin are starting to respond to the problem. Young says he has seen progress in how often companies are responding to firmware problems or at least acknowledging that there is a growing problem. Indeed, when LIFX found out about the Wi-Fi credentials flaw, they patched it right away. Because there are so many small companies making IoT devices, the problem won’t go away anytime soon. Foeckl says IT departments need to start including IoT devices in their security monitoring efforts and certification and testing processes, and that they should work with their vendors to make sure these devices are patched, tracked, and protected.

Data Integration Continues to Bedevil Healthcare Industry

“This is a process moving forward that’s going to require a partnership with the private sector and all of our federal partners,” said DeSalvo, who added that the private sector in particular has stepped forward to mature FHIR as a standard. DeSalvo added that electronic health information comes not just from EHRs, but also from wearables, the Internet of Things and mobile healthcare technologies. “It’s coming from so many sources today, compared to where it was in 2008 when we started measuring,” she said. The challenge now “is how to bring that information together to make it usable and actionable for everybody who wants it.” At the same time, DeSalvo made the case that beyond technology, true data integration will require a change in the culture of data sharing in the healthcare industry.

Will IoT technology bring us the quantified employee?

The desire to quantify, measure, and monitor ourselves has spawned an entire industry, with companies developing wearable computing devices, fitness trackers, and mobile communication tools at a fevered pace. Consumers bought more than 45 million wearable devices and fitness trackers in 2015, and analysts expect demand to grow by more than 45 percent annually through 2019, becoming one of the fastest-growing technology markets. What are these wearable devices doing for us? They are giving us information on our exercise, sleep, movements, diet, and pulse, creating the quantified self, powered by an architecture of technology referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). But when the quantified self arrives at the office, does he or she become the quantified employee? Many employers would hope so: With oceans of data from workers’ wearables,

How Israel is turning part of the Negev Desert into a cyber-city

The roots of Israel as a cyber power go back to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said retired Brig. Gen. Yair Cohen, another former head of Unit 8200, which employs thousands of soldiers and serves a role similar to the National Security Agency. In less than three weeks, Israel lost more than 2,000 soldiers largely because of a dramatic failure of intelligence. As a result, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decided to reinforce their signals intelligence arm, Unit 8200. The unit sought the best code-makers and code-breakers, Cohen said. It also began to conduct its own research and development, with soldiers building radio interception, and now cyber tools. “We cannot wait for someone in the United States to give us technology,” said Cohen, who now runs his own cyber venture capital firm.

Polar A360 Review – Simple And Efficient

As you would expect from any decent tracker, the A360 monitors activity and provides in-depth feedback, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. The Polar A360 can also record sleeping patterns, show you smart notifications, and warn you when you’ve been sitting at your desk for too long. Also, the Polar A360 is water-resistant up to 30 meters, therefore, you do not have to take it off while swimming or taking a shower. As a downside, the Polar A360 is missing the GPS sensor. I have the feeling that this is something dedicated runners might not like. Other than that, the Polar A360 bracelet feels like a robust and capable fitness tracker. I must say that overall, I am quite impressed with this tracker. Well done Polar.

Can a city switch entirely to driverless cars?

The Department of Transportation and major U.S. cities are betting on technology to solve their transit woes. As part of its "Smart Cities Challenge," the DOT will give a winning city up to $40 million to help it experiment with innovative transit options. It would also be eligible for an additional $10 million from Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc. San Francisco, a finalist, imagines a fanciful city with an elaborate network of city-run self-driving cars and shuttles, where the on-demand businesses it's still struggling to regulate are a seamless part of life. The most technologically ambitious part of San Francisco's big vision, created by the city's new Office of Innovation, is getting people out of the driver's seat and into shared, autonomous cars. The idea is to reduce traffic and reclaim parking structures and some roadways for housing and parks.

TeamViewer Credential Breach, Bitcoiner Computers at Risk

While possible that TeamViewer’s breach is correlated to the recent Myspace hacking incident, the availability of 2-factor authentication data rules out Myspace credentials being the main culprit. If you currently use TeamViewer, then your first step is to check if your authentication credentials were leaked (Use HaveIBeenPwned to check.) If so, change passwords for every service and consider yourself very lucky if nothing else has been accessed — like your email or bank account. Next, you should login to TeamViewer’s application console. Now, on the upper-right side of the screen, click your username > edit profile > active logins, to see every device and location that has accessed your account. Nothing is worse than having your cryptocurrency stolen. Eliminate potential vectors of attack!

How To Embrace The Benefits Of Shadow IT

Many IT organizations have evolved over time, morphing to accommodate major transformation projects such as ERP implementations AND refreshes, re-platforming from legacy technologies to current day solutions, and extending or contracting based on mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. As a result, the size, shape and composition of the traditional IT organization is often as confusing and complex as the myriad of technologies that are woven together into a tapestry of IT solutions that are constantly challenged to keep up with business needs. Contrast that dynamic with shadow IT, which is often set up by the business for the business, very well aligned with the affordability and competitive demands of the business, is easily understood as it aligns perfectly with the business functions OR products, embraces the latest and greatest technologies via SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and other consumption-based models, and is agile by design—not as a costly retrofit.

Adopting Open Source Development Practices in Organizations

The first step toward an inner-source initiative is to select an appropriate seed product— an existing initial implementation of a software product or component. Similarly to projects in open source communities, starting an innersource project from scratch is difficult. Without an initial vision of a project, it’s hard to attract developers from across an organization to invest time and resources. Instead, it’s much more useful to have a seed product that can attract a developer community and grow to a successful inner-source project. This seed project must offer sufficient value to an organization. Starting an innersource project around a new operating system or database management system is unlikely to attract many contributors because building such commodity software is wasteful.

The Art of Intelligent Deception in Cyber Security

Decoys counter sophisticated types of attack by applying techniques that entice attackers, fool and feed them false data, and provide an organization a forensic trail of the attacker’s movements and the option to react before the data is stolen. Attackers that are able to get through the perimeter of a network are typically shrewd and familiar with the layout of a common corporate network. However, even the most experienced hackers are initially working with a handicap as they are still learning the inner workings of a specific network. This is a weakness that organizations must exploit quickly by creating a mirage to confuse and lure in the attacker. This deception strategy is similar to what has been used in combat for centuries. Strategically placed decoys in the form of fake equipment and communications confuse the opposition and lure them away from their target, providing the opposition the advantage.

Quote for the day:

"We cannot evoke the true spirit of sacrifice and valour, so long as we are not free." -- Mahatma Gandhi

June 02, 2016

‘Vendor Overload’ Adds To CISO Burnout

Irfan Saif, a partner in Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services, said the need to understand the organization’s needs and business requirements is “paramount,” and the failure to do that can lead to the use, or overuse, of, “overlapping or redundant tools that aren’t integrated or aren’t working in unison towards mitigating and managing key risks to the organization.” That, he said, “can distract from the more important task of truly understanding the risks and threats and designing the right solutions, which may include one or more technologies working in tandem.” Hutchinson agreed. “Focus on what your business needs, not what tools are available,” she said, adding that it is also important to make sure security measures enable the business, and don’t restrict what workers need to do.

How Google Fiber Could Upset The Entire Broadband Industry

Long story short, if Alphabet decides to take on Comcast and Time Warner, there’s literally nothing the two companies can do except watch as their customers abandon them. People are desperate for an alternative to price-gouging and poor service. I don’t think I’m remiss in saying that the only reason America’s two biggest ISPs are still in business is because they have a monopoly - Comcast and Time Warner are the very definition of broken brands. Just look at what happened this past November, when Comcast tried to post a snide remark on Facebook about Google Fiber losing connectivity during a televised sporting event. They were met with torrents of negativity, which they desperately tried to mitigate (to no avail). Fact is, if Google Fiber manages to succeed, things might start looking very grim for Comcast.

Cloud Security 101: What is Cloud Compliance?

Many providers already have very mature programs in place to deal with common standards, and are able to map those standards to customer controls as part of their workload migration and onboarding process. It is critical that an enterprise choose cloud vendors that are able to meet or exceed their security and compliance standards – mapping and assisting in audit and compliance activities should be delineated in contracts and service level agreements before any workload migrations start. With the variety of cloud solutions in the marketplace, a solution exists that will mesh with a company’s compliance concerns, and allow them to maintain the progress in security and compliance maturity they had achieved before migrating to the cloud.

Big data without the big headaches: How to get your strategy right

Big data is big business: analyst Gartner says the amount of chief data officers (CDOs) being appointed by major organisations rose from 400 in 2014 to 1,000 in 2015. The analyst predicts 90 per cent of large companies will have a CDO by 2019. Such CDOs can help firms to focus on the value of analytical information. But all organisations -- with or without the appointment of a CDO -- must find ways to demonstrate the value of big data, and that job often falls to the CIO. So when it comes to setting a big data strategy, what is the role of the CIO and how can he or she help the rest of the organisation to make the most of their information? ZDNet speaks to the experts and discovers best practice advice.

Microsoft Teams With Blockstack, ConsenSys to Develop Blockchain IDs

Together, the companies are embarking on an open-source collaboration that will incorporate the Bitcoin-based Blockstack identity platform and uPort, the Ethereum identity management and wallet technology from ConsenSys. They expect to produce an extensible, cross-chain identity platform that will be compatible with any future blockchains and other decentralized systems. "Our goal in contributing to this initiative is to start a conversation on blockchain-based identity that could improve apps, services, and more importantly, the lives of real people worldwide by enabling self-owned or self-sovereign identity," said Yorke Rhodes, blockchain business strategist at Microsoft, in a May 31 announcement. "An implementation of self-sovereign identity can be established using the qualities of blockchain based systems and we have chosen to start collaborating with two partners with considerable blockchain identity expertise."

Cognitive Bias and Innovation: How Can We Combat Instinct?

Rather than expecting yourself, as an innovator, to identify areas of bias and change them, create systems where your bias is limited and horizons are changed. If looking at information, attempt to approach it clinically, as if someone else was asking you for help. Institute systems that don’t rely on individual perceptions to make decisions. Allow lots of time for important decisions to be examined fully. Bring in outsider opinions. Plan on always taking extra time for big decisions so that your conscious mind will be able to review your choices without the pressure that often prompts gut instincts to kick in. Get second opinions from people who are outside your core team. If you are hiring to fill a position, create a system where you won’t have any indication of candidates’ races or genders in their initial applications.

Embracing Cloud: How Cloud Services Impact All Verticals and Industries

Digital business incompetence will cause a quarter of organizations to lose their market position by 2017. The former Gartner analyst believes every company in the world is in “some way” an IT company – but while firms work on expanding cloud products and services, they need to remember the focus is on business. However, Bova thinks many within the enterprise are destined to make a mess of this, and will lose their market positions in the next few years as a result. With all of this in mind, it’s critical to see that the emergence of the cloud has helped many organizations expand beyond their current physical data center. New types of cloud-based technologies allow IT environments to truly consolidate and grow their infrastructure quickly, and, more importantly affordably.

Delivering Effective Quality of Service

You can eliminate the conflict over resources, or you can simply increase the performance resources available. That’s one of the reasons for the explosion in all-flash storage; organizations are throwing more and more all-flash at their performance problems. But all-flash alone is not enough—it’s a band-aid. It postpones having to deal with the underlying problem (LUNs), and you have to apply more and more over time. It’s easy to see how costs can spiral out of control. Now, some storage providers tout QoS despite having a LUN-based architecture—but that’s not a solution either. You can set QoS for an entire LUN. If a VM within that LUN goes rogue you can use QoS to assign the entire LUN even more performance. Since you can’t see which specific VM is causing problems, you’re just pouring performance resources at the LUN, not addressing the root cause.

CIO interview: Lee Edwards, chief technology officer, The British Library

“What we need to do is improve the efficiency of the delivery of those services and that underlying infrastructure – the plumbing and wiring that the Library runs on,” says Edwards. “Moving to infrastructure-, storage-, platform- and desktop-as-a-service will give the business the ability to expand its capacity.” Edwards adds that the needs will become greater as the Library expands its collection and progresses with its digitisation work. IT infrastructure at the British Library is mainly managed in-house. According to Edwards, although the organisation works with various suppliers for maintenance and licensing, it is a “very transactional” supplier support arrangement. “If we have a fault on a network that has a server chassis, then we may get the hardware supplier out,” says Edwards. “But we don’t really have a strategic partnership, which is an issue we are looking to solve.

Why business apps design must better cater to consumer habits to improve user experience

First and foremost, we need to build it intuitively, so that you naturally apply the patterns that you have to that software, but we should come about it in a different way, where training is in context, in product. We’re doing new things with overlays. and to take users through a tour, or step them through a new feature, to give them just the quick highlights of where things are. You see this sort of thing in mobile apps all the time after you install an update. In addition to that, we build in-context questions or answers right there at the point of need, where the user is likely to encounter something new or initially unknown in the the product. So it’s just-in-time and in little snippets. But underpinning all of it, the experience has to be very, very simple, so that you don’t have to go through this overarching hurdle to understand it.

Quote for the day:

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." -- Dr. Seuss

June 01, 2016

Robots beware: Humans will still be bosses of machines

There are two basic ways to augment. One is to work alongside smart machines, and complement their activity. The other is to dip into what smart machines are unlikely to be able to do any time soon. For the first set, working closely with machines, it's a day-to-day colleague sort of role. Just as with a human colleague, you'd know what they were good at and what they were not so good at, so you can step in when they're unable to do a task. Then, there's the computer's boss role. I think of hedge fund managers or something as an archetypal role like that, where the trading may all be done by machines these days, but somebody's got to look at the whole portfolio and see how it's performing. Do we need more automation, less automation, different types of automation?

Managing the Bots that Are Managing the Business

Managers must become product and experience designers, deeply engaged with customers and their needs, creating services that start out as a compelling promise and get better over time the more people use them, via a “build-measure-learn” process. A service like Uber is based on a deep rethinking of the fundamental workflows of on-demand transportation (what used to be called “taxis”) in light of what technology now makes possible. Before Uber, who would have thought that a passenger could summon a car to a specific spot, and know just when they were going to be picked up? Yet that capability was already lying latent in smartphones. There is an arc to knowledge, in which expertise becomes embodied into products. Workers can be “upskilled” not just by training but by software assistants that allow them to do jobs for which they were previously under-qualified.

CFOs are more invested in tech than CIOs think

CIOs often tend to be either big idea generators focused on innovations or integrators who hang their hats on connections and the big picture. Many CFOs meanwhile tend to be more methodical, detail-oriented and risk-averse, while some CFOs value direct communications and a focus on results. While it is often challenging for an innovation-oriented CIO to see eye-to-eye with the risk-averse CFO, Deloitte says each must identify those differences early on and adjust their communication styles to strengthen their partnership. Once communications styles are balanced and accounted for, Kambil says, CIOs must do a better job explaining the value of technologies to their CFOs. ... "CIOs can play a better role in helping CFOs understand how technology is evolving, as well as helping them understand the architecture they're investing in," Kambil says.

Reddit CTO: Stick to Boring Tech when Building Your Startup

“There are a lot of tools that may not scale with you, but they will get you going faster,” he said. Pick well-known technologies like NGINX, Ubuntu, GitHub, and Python. “Python is a really mature tech. Everyone knows how to use it, and you can hire for it,” he said. For most common data capture tasks, such as storing user comments or log-in credentials, MySQL is the way to go. AWS offers a hosted MySQL service through RDS. AWS manages the service, with capabilities such as automatic failover and configurations, and as the company grows you can transfers responsibility over to your own staff. “The boring tech revolution is here,” he said. And don’t worry about optimizing your queries yet. “Don’t optimize anything on the backend unless you have to,” he said

Online Shareholders’ Meetings Lower Costs, but Also Interaction

Companies are adopting this technology for a number of reasons. There are the obvious cost savings, because they do not have to pay for a location and serve food (however meager, although some companies are known for their shareholders’ meeting spreads). And having a virtual meeting allows people to “attend” who would not otherwise want to make the trip. The company can also better track shareholder attendance and participation. Perhaps more important, a virtual shareholders’ meeting allows the company to manage troublesome shareholders and their often uncomfortable questions. Some of this may provide a welcome limit on the time monopolized by corporate gadflies such as John Chevedden, James McRitchie and William Steiner, who were responsible for a staggering 70 percent of shareholder proposals sponsored by individuals among Fortune 250 companies in 2014, according to a study by the Manhattan Institute.

How ‘Agile’ Changed Security At Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet is at an interesting crossroads. We’re investing in technology and a huge part of that is security. We previously outsourced our security functions and heavily relied on managed security services. This approach doesn’t always work. After being a product manager, I understand agile very well. We started it with the application security team as an experiment. Our work was reactive, and I wanted to shift that. We took control of our day-to-day activities and were able to better manage to our priorities. We also established processes for how other teams engage with us. ... Our security operations team — which is naturally reactive — has run into some problems with Scrum, a form of agile which is time boxed. The team was struggling to keep up with requests. It was a perpetual cycle of trying to keep their heads above water.

Is network fabric heading down the same path as ‘software defined’ and ‘stacking’?

A key requirement of a fabric is that it should work across vendors, allowing for traffic to move seamlessly across different environments. Any kind of translation that has to be done at the edge of a network would break the uniformity of the fabric. There are a couple of vendors today that support TRILL, but they either have proprietary control or data planes, making them non-interoperable with “standards-based” TRILL. It may be possible to get these proprietary versions to work together through some sort of TRILL gateway, but as a I point out above, this is no longer a single fabric. The solutions do address the limitations of legacy networks and offer fabric-like capabilities in a single network, but its use would be limited to that one network.

The biggest data challenges that you might not even know you have

Cognitive technology has the capability to harness unstructured data and keep businesses ahead of the competition by leveraging human cognitive frameworks. Cognitive technology, like IBM Watson, can analyze unstructured data, interpret this data to create insights, evaluate all possible decisions using evidential support, and then come to a conclusion with a level of confidence. Leveraging unstructured data with the help of cognitive computing can dramatically change the way that business is conducted. ... Stand out seeking out cognitive solutions, which have the ability to aggregate and find patterns within data at an extremely fast pace. This will allow you – or your customers – to improve decision-making at the speed of insight.

10 things you should know about running an IoT project function

One of the biggest issues companies face today is deciding who in the organization should run IoT. In some cases, they start with an innovative engineer. In other cases, a product manager or a manager from IT or an end-business function is given the role. And sometimes, the company decides it doesn't have anyone who is a good fit to run the IoT function so it decides to hire from the outside. ... If the intent of IoT work is to create a salable product, more must go into the project than just designing and building the technology. It must be packaged for the market and a marketing plan must be constructed. The IoT project might have to be sold to the CEO and the board of directors. This requires a product manager set of skills that can go far beyond the initial technical engineering expertise that goes into the product.

Security Concerns Rising For Internet Of Things Devices

Hackers always seem to flock to the most popular platforms. It’s one of the reasons there are more risks for Windows users than the Mac -- there’s a much bigger footprint.According to BI Intelligence, there will be 34 billion connected devices in the world by 2020, creating a $6 trillion industry; surprisingly, BI names business as the main IoT adopter. The costs are low, the gadgets are simple to install, and they solve nagging problems. One good example of this is the Belkin WeMo platform. Young says you can install a device like this outlet that you can control with your smartphone in five minutes. Yet, there might not be any intrusion detection for a product like that. In a worst case scenario, he says, a Chinese hacker could find a vulnerability for these outlets and then power cycle them repeatedly for thousands of users all over the U.S. to cause massive blackouts. Yet, for the end-user, there is some incredible usefulness, energy savings, low costs, and a simple install.

Quote for the day:

"Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself." -- Julia Cameron,