Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 23, 2016

Training, Awareness Keys to Battling Social Engineering

Social engineering is especially dangerous for employees who may have special access to valuable assets that other employees may not, such as the ability to wire funds. A good example of this occurred last year when Ubiquiti Networks Inc., a US-based manufacturer of high-performance networking technology for service providers and enterprises, was taken for US $39 million. An employee of a Ubiquiti subsidiary was the victim of a CEO scam, which hijacks or impersonates the email of a senior executive within an organization. In this case the victim, who had authority to initiate wire transfers, transferred large amounts of money from company accounts to the criminal’s accounts. Adversaries are cognizant of the basic human tendency to trust people on face value, and accordingly, they abuse that trust to perform social engineering attacks.

User experience and the IoT: tech should be all about humans

Historically, IoT solutions have not considered human beings in their equations and strategy roll out; which has proven to be a challenge, mainly because their solutions never came into contact with people, except through data dashboard and notification systems. Today, however, we are seeing products in the hands of people that are IoT dependent, but the consumer does not even understand the IoT is being used. In most cases, the consumer has no idea who or what IoT is. A great example is that people see Uber as a mobile app that calls a taxi — they are not running around talking about a great IoT app that they just downloaded. What Uber correctly achieved was to design a service that uses IoT concepts to provide a valuable service to people. Today, those people know Uber, not IoT. Without IoT though, Uber would not be possible.

Digital disruptor: now keywords in enterprise architects' job descriptions

A digital enterprise is one that takes advantage of a constellation of technology platforms and strategies -- including cloud, mobile, social, data analytics and Internet of Things. ... the famous startups that are creating so much pain within established markets -- you know, the Ubers and Airbnbs -- do one thing really well. More established enterprises are capable of doing multiple things well. The key is doing all those things well, in an integrated fashion -- something only established companies are in a position to do. "Competitive advantage will come from taking capabilities that others may or may not have and integrating them in ways that make something extraordinarily powerful," Ross is quoted as saying. "Integrating business capabilities provides a whole value proposition that is hard for others to copy."

How to Improve Machine Learning: Tricks and Tips for Feature Engineering

Predictive modeling is a formula that transforms a list of input fields or variables into some output of interest. Feature engineering is simply a thoughtful creation of new input fields from existing input fields, either in an automated fashion or manually, with valuable inputs from domain expertise, logical reasoning, or intuition. The new input fields could result in better inferences and insights from data and exponentially increase the performance of predictive models. Feature engineering is one of the most important parts of the data preparation process, where deriving new and meaningful variables takes place. Feature engineering enhances and enriches the ingredients needed for creating a robust model. Many times, it is the key differentiator between an average and a good model.

Snowden Designs a Device to Warn if Your iPhone’s Radios Are Snitching

Huang’s and Snowden’s solution to that radio-snitching problem is to build a modification for the iPhone 6 that they describe as an “introspection engine.” Their add-on would appear to be little more than an external battery case with a small mono-color screen. But it would function as a kind of miniature, form-fitting oscilloscope: Tiny probe wires from that external device would snake into the iPhone’s innards through its SIM-card slot to attach to test points on the phone’s circuit board. (The SIM card itself would be moved to the case to offer that entry point.) Those wires would read the electrical signals to the two antennas in the phone that are used by its radios, including GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular modem.

IBM Announces Blockchain Cloud Services on LinuxOne Server

A new cloud environment for business-to-business networks announced by IBM last week will allow companies to test performance, privacy, and interoperability of their blockchain ecosystems within a secure environment, the company said. Based on IBM’s LinuxONE, a Linux-only server designed for high-security projects, the new cloud environment will let enterprises test and run blockchain projects that handle private data for their customers. The service is still in limited beta, so IBM clients will not be able to get their hands on it just yet. Once it launches, however, the company said clients will be able to run blockchain in production environments that let them quickly and easily access secure, partitioned blockchain networks.

Bad UX kills

Great experiences don’t have to be complex: One of the greatest innovations in transit user experience in the past 50 years is not the autonomous car or the hyperloop, but rather a sign on a train that says “Quiet Car.” This simple piece of vinyl has an immense ROI, having made a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of commuters, allowing them to catch up on precious sleep or focus intently, fundamentally altering commutes from lost time into productive hours. The Pentagram-designed “LOOK!” warnings painted on the street at crossings is another lightweight, ingenious improvement. Its eyes prompt you to look the way they are pointing, and have likely saved countless cell phone zombies and tourists from getting run over by a taxi or bus, not to mention clearing the way for city emergency response resources.

Intro to knysa: Async-Await Style PhantomJS Scripting

PhantomJS is a modern headless (no GUI) browser scriptable with a JavaScript API. It’s perfect for page automation and testing. The JavaScript API is brilliant, offering many advantages but it also suffers from the same “callback hell” problem with JavaScript, i.e. deep nested callbacks. There are many libraries and frameworks to help deal with this problem. For PhantomJS, CasperJS is one such solution that is very popular, but it only mitigates the problem and does not solve it. knysa, on the other hand, solves the problem elegantly. Like CasperJS, it allows you to put steps in sequence. Unlike CasperJS, it does not add a lot of boilerplate code (e.g. casper.then(), etc.).

Optimizing Dashboard Design to Drive Action

When a dashboard is working well, it focuses each recipient on how they can specifically impact organizational core metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as retention, conversion and lifetime value. Before you build your first chart, understand the context in which your initiative operates. What are the core metrics your company cares about? What are the existing dashboards your executives look at every day? Make sure your data includes a semi-live feed of these core metrics so you can display them in your dashboard. This information is vital to an effective dashboard. Analyze your data to identify the correlations that will answer the “why” for action. Include customer sentiment data so you can identify the path from your organization’s activities, through customer sentiment and behavior, to resulting KPIs.

Facebook's giant solar-powered drone takes flight to deliver internet to remote areas

According to a blog post by Jay Parikh, global head of engineering and infrastructure at Facebook, this was the first time the team had been able to fly the full-sized aircraft. The low-altitude flight lasted longer than 90 minutes, which was three times longer than had originally been planned for. The flight took place in Yuma, AZ. "When complete, Aquila will be able to circle a region up to 60 miles in diameter, beaming connectivity down from an altitude of more than 60,000 feet using laser communications and millimeter wave systems. Aquila is designed to be hyper efficient, so it can fly for up to three months at a time," Parikh wrote. While some refer to Aquila as a drone, being that it is unmanned, Facebook refers to it as "a high-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned solar-powered airplane."

Quote for the day:

“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.” -- Lemony Snicket

July 22, 2016

Internet of Things: From sensing to doing

The value that IoT brings lies in the information it creates. It has powerful potential for boosting analytics efforts. Strategically deployed, analytics can help organizations translate IoT’s digital data into meaningful insights that can be used to develop new products, offerings, and business models. IoT can provide a line of sight into the world outside company walls, and help strategists and decision makers understand their customers, products, and markets more clearly. And IoT can drive so much more—including opportunities to integrate and automate business processes in ways never before possible.

Software-Defined Everything: Beyond the Cloud

Software-Defined Compute is expanding past now-traditional virtualization into containers. SDN is branching out of the Cloud providers and telco infrastructure into enterprise networking. And SDS is building upon core storage abstractions like object storage, database storage, and elastic block storage to a range of data virtualization and orchestration capabilities that support Big Data use cases as well as traditional enterprise “small” data needs.In fact, vendors like Primary Data are extending this SDS vision by essentially building a Software-Defined abstraction on top of Cloud-centric storage abstractions. With Primary Data, an enterprise doesn’t have to worry whether underlying storage is object storage or database storage, for example, simplifying Hybrid Cloud scenarios and complex tasks like Big Data processing and software upgrades.

Top 10 Considerations for Efficient IoT Deployments in Smart Cities

Citizens are core to the success of any technology implementation done in the context of a city. As they are the main consumer and the biggest beneficiary of this solution, their involvement in the solution is highly critical. Many countries have adopted the concept of “Create or Join a Project”, which aims at involving citizens at the very early stages of conceptualization and then implementation. Citizens are not just any other involvement, they are actually a major source of data that is fed back to the system during the implementation process. For example, a broken Water pipe, can be bought to the quick attention of the system if the solution provides a provision to allow the citizen to upload an image and the location of the broken water pipe. The same can be applied for a broken street light or a possible security breach.

Cloud Computing's Big, Disruptive Multiple Hundred Billion Dollar Impact

Companies that sell hardware and software to corporate customers are all threatened by this shift. In the old days, a company would sell an operating system and software for each user. In the cloud realm, operating system are parcelled out on shared servers for use on a pay by the hour basis. Public cloud deployment is seen as a godsend for small companies, which used to have to spend almost all of their initial funding on servers and software. AWS upended that model to let startups get going fast and cheap by paying pennies per hour for computing power. However, the notion that public cloud is always the cheapest option once startups get big, is still debatable. Once a company hits a certain size and has to deal with lots of data, some analysts and corporate execs say it’s time to bring IT back in-house because cloud has gotten too pricey

Cyber security basics: 4 best practices for stopping the insider threat

The insider threat, simply meaning a threat that comes from within an organisation, is a growing concern for cyber security practitioners. Unlike with external threats such as hackers or the latest malware, organisations can not simply buy a shiny new antivirus or firewall product and rest assured that they have it covered. This is because the insider threat can follow any number of patterns. There are both malicious and inadvertent insider threat actors in abundance. On the inadvertent side, 65 percent of office workers use a single password among applications, according to the 2016 Market Pulse report commissioned by SailPoint. The survey also found that a third of employees shared passwords with co-workers, while 26 percent admitted to uploading sensitive information to cloud apps with the aim of sharing it outside the company.

GOP cyber platform "detrimental to global stability"

“There is a distinct lack of clarity about rules of the road for peacetime, and the norms and laws that do and will govern offensive cyber operations in peacetime [are] still highly malleable,” explained Robert Morgus, a policy analyst with D.C.-based think tank New America. “This means that operations conducted by the U.S. and others are highly influential in shaping those rules, and pushing the red line too far — while useful for short-term strategic goals like disrupting the Iranian nuclear program — may prove detrimental to global stability in the long run,” he added. ... “it’s important to draw a line between offensive cyber operations conducted for espionage or intelligence gathering purposes and offensive computer network operations,” he said.

Google Sprints Ahead in AI Building Blocks, Leaving Rivals Wary

"It’s the next big area, and people are worried Google’s going to own the show," said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who has served on the technical advisory board of Microsoft Corp.’s research lab. "There is a network effect, and it’s a really excellent system." Google initially used TensorFlow internally for products like its Inbox and Photos apps. The company made it available for free in November. Technology companies like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. rushed to give away their own versions, hoping to get the most outside developers using their standards. The company that wins will benefit from the collective efforts of thousands of developers using, but also updating and improving, its system. That’s an advantage when it comes time to make money from the new asset.

Cloud Services Now Account For A Third Of IT Outsourcing Market

We’ve known for some time now that the as-a-service sector has been eating into the market share of traditional service providers. How else to explain that contract counts are soaring, but contract values are remaining relatively stagnant in the traditional market? We knew anecdotally that a lot of client work was moving to the public cloud infrastructure and cloud software markets, and we also knew it was time to begin an empirical measurement of that growing shift. That’s why we decided to move beyond our initial examinations of this phenomenon and officially expand the coverage of our [index]. The drivers for cloud have changed noticeably over the past three years. Initially, cloud interest and adoption was concentrated primarily on cost reduction, in line with what we traditionally have seen as a driver for outsourcing.

Trojanized Remote-Access Tool Spreads Malware

"There is no problem with detecting the malware," Vasily Berdnikov, a security expert at Kaspersky, tells Information Security Media Group. "The problem is that, in this case, the malware came packed with legitimate software. The thinking behind this strategy is simple: Criminals expect that the system administrator will simply ignore the warning from the security solution, because he will be sure that he is downloading legitimate software from the legitimate source." Attackers have long favored gaining access to remote-access tools present inside victim organizations, because they provide an easy way to remotely launch further attacks or exfiltrate data. But Berdnikov says this is the first time Kaspersky's researchers have seen a criminal group hide malware inside a legitimate remote-access tool.

Effective Third-Party Risk Assessment – A Balancing Process

The very practical need for thorough third-party assessments is the fact that third-parties are increasingly targeted by criminals, and continue to be the primary source of breach incidents. Rather than attempt to breach the systems of large and usually well protected company networks, criminals look for the weakest link in the chain, which is all too often a third-party. The growing demand for more comprehensive third-party assessments necessarily requires expanded resources, budgets and timelines for completion. These needs run contrary to very real budget and staff constraints, and the pace at which business units need to bring new (often web/cloud based) products and services to market. So, how do you satisfy the growing demand for more comprehensive assessments of third-party risk controls without substantially increasing the cost and time for conducting assessments?

Quote for the day:

"In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm. In the real world all rests on perseverance." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

July 21, 2016

Cognitive Business: When Cloud and Cognitive Computing Merge

Another maybe even more important trend, that is actually being driven by cloud computing, is the rapid expansion of cognitive computing. In this arena, IBM’s Watson, famously known for defeating Jeopardy gameshow champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, has quickly established itself as a commercial cognitive computing powerhouse. Contemporary reports of the Jeopardy contest from the New York Times cited this victory as IBM’s “…proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them”. Although we are not yet at the human replacement stage, the merger of cloud and cognitive computing is rocking the business status quo.

The State of Digital Currency: A discussion with Ed Scheidt

One of the keys to acceptance is the ability to check validity of currency and reduce the risk of fraud. We discussed the fact that even with block-chain and other types of encryption, there needs to be new technology invented that provides the same level of trust (and risk reduction) that you get with physical currency. If you look at the current one-hundred dollar bill, it has a myriad of security features like a 3-d ribbon, color-shifting ink, watermarks, raised printing, etc. All of these features could be reproduced by a counterfeiter, but only with a large amount of time and resources. DC has none of these layered features in a mature way today, but will someday. So, for DC to really work, the digital equivalents of these features will need to be created, validated, produced, and trusted.

Blockchain: a case for the general ledger

Despite the potential of a distributed ledger, financial institutions are not rushing to replace legacy systems with the new technology. Blockchain or its variants will be adopted in a bigger scale only after early movers address underlying questions. Will a distributed network operate as efficaciously as the tried and tested centralised system? Can blockchain ensure interoperability? Who is responsible in the event of a dysfunctional system? How will cryptocurrency and related technology be regulated? Fortunately, the industry is not waiting for answers. Several financial services enterprises are developing in-house models and forging partnerships to create proofs of concept. Venture capital is pouring into start-ups building payment platforms using cryptography even as industry leaders incorporate blockchain technology into securities management, post-trade processing, settlement, and asset servicing.

Looking Deeper, Seeing More: A Multilayer Map of the Financial System

Multilayer maps can capture more information.7 They portray the financial system as a network of networks. For example, a multilayer map can help identify a large market participant that is a node in more than one market layer. Such a company could be a source of strength to the financial system, if managed well. If not, it could be a source of weakness. The failure of one of these nodes in a layer can lead to failures of dependent nodes in other layers. This phenomenon can happen repeatedly, leading to a cascade of failures. For that reason, multilayer networks are more fragile than single-layer networks. Connections between the layers can amplify the scope and magnitude of stress in a single layer. Maps of multilayer networks show three stages of damage following a major shock.

Utah teen launches consumer drone that can fly over 70 mph

"After spending an hour with George, I was overwhelmingly impressed by his vision for a drone platform as well as his presence as an entrepreneur," wrote Ben Lambert, from Pelion Venture Partners, in a post on Medium. George clearly has an engineering mindset, but he's also a savvy businessman. When he was a kid (which wasn't that long ago, after all), he always had lemonade stands or some other way to make a few bucks. "I was always an entrepreneur at heart," he told me. In these early days, Teal has been operating out of Pelion's Salt Lake City office. George says he's managing to stay grounded while handling large responsibility at such a young age with the support from his family and school, but he also mentioned "half-jokingly" that spending quality time with his investors has helped. "Ben tells me every day that I suck," George said.

10 TB in a 1 cm space: Will chlorine atoms redefine storage?

The technology is dependent on the ability to quickly rearrange in square grids that sit next to each other as terraces. Each grid represents a single byte, and it contains slots that the atoms can be moved around in to represent either a one or a zero, thereby encoding the information. The atoms are moved between slots using a scanning tunnelling microscope. Atomic markers were added to the grids, making reading them easier and faster than previous methods. This new atomic storage technology is a major discovery, but it is still in the proof-of-principle phase, and it has some major drawbacks that may slow its development. One of the biggest issues is that it must be kept at the temperature of -196 °C, which is the the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. While warmer and cheaper than using liquid helium as a coolant, as noted in Nature, it still creates a problem.

Mads Torgersen on C# 7 and Beyond

QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Mads Torgersen who leads the C# language design process at Microsoft, where he has been involved in five versions of C#, and also contributed to TypeScript, Visual Basic, Roslyn and LINQ. Before he joined Microsoft a decade ago, he worked as a university professor in Aarhus, Denmark, doing research into programming language design and contributing to Java generics. Key takeaways are: The overall theme for C# 7 will be features that make it easier to work with data, including language level support for tuples. The release may also include pattern matching for type switching; C# 7 is the first new release of the language to be completely built in the open; Roslyn, the compiler and API, allows a much more agile evolution of the language.

Securing the NextGen aviation network

In the past, we were very, very focused. We had a very simple model, which was we would look at how our system is secured and if somebody else was having a technological problem on their side the way we would protect the integrity and the safety of the system was we simply wouldn't allow them in. That would result if airline A is having technology problems, we're not going to dispatch their flights. To a certain extent we still do some of that but now that all of our systems are interlinked, if an airline is experiencing a problem it's very important that we understand what is the potential that that could bleed over into our systems through the interconnections and gateways that we have connecting our system to theirs. Likewise, it's not just the companies and their operating systems. It's also the avionics systems in the aircraft themselves.

Doctor devises new database methodology to thwart hackers and end big data breaches

Yasnoff created the personal grid, in fact, to make it so each record of information is stored in a separate file, and each files is encrypted individually with its own encryption key. “If a hacker breaks into a server room and literally takes a whole server away, that hacker would have to break through strong encryption to get one single patient record,” Yasnoff explained. “And then that hacker would have to break through more strong encryption to get a second record, and then repeat the same for a third, and a fourth, and so on. The work involved in getting hundreds of thousands to millions of records becomes prohibitively massive for a hacker.” There is, however, one catch: Unlike a database where all records are stored in one file, a clinician cannot quickly search patient records stored and encrypted separately within a database. But Yasnoff has come up with a solution to this hurdle.

Oracle To Reboot Java EE For The Cloud

Within cloud-based environments, infrastructure no longer relies on application servers running on dedicated hardware. Moreover, an enormous volume of transactions must be handled, requiring a different model for state and transaction management than what has been offered in Java EE for scaling applications, Kurian said. Meanwhile, container technologies such as Docker have emerged, with requirements for externalizing configuration management, deployment of applications, and packaging. Oracle wants to make accommodations for these paradigm changes. Oracle plans to fit Java EE 8 with capabilities for persisting data in a key-value store, based on NoSQL stores, and a transaction model for eventual consistency and relaxed transactions. On the whole, Oracle's improvements would help Java EE developers evolve their skill sets to leverage technology shifts such as these, Kurian said.

Quote for the day:

"You got to be careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." --Yogi Berra

July 20, 2016

The Body as Interface and Interpreting the Body talks

It helps us move away from viewing things in terms of the interfaces we are familiar with. For instance, we were able to provide an alternative to the mouse by introducing touch screens. We then moved from touch screens to more gestural interfaces with the Kinect and virtual reality goggles. We need to build devices that give users greater autonomy to determine where they go with the design. Thinking of the body as an interface and designing with that mindset, lends itself to a more experimental and iterative approach to design. ... You can track metrics like temperature, heart rate, blood pressure or breathing rate, to stop traders trading when they’re more likely to make a decision based on emotion. Emotion sensors can allow users to better control their behaviour in emotionally charged situations.

MicroProfile streamlines Java EE for microservices

The MicroProfile approach to optimizing for microservices is to start with a small core set of features and grow from there with heavy involvement from the community. The core platform will likely add functionality over time, some of which will come from Java EE related JSRs, and some that are not directly related to Java EE at all. For the latter, the MicroProfile community will investigate how to more directly address microservice-related patterns like circuit breakers, bulkheads and service discovery. The MicroProfile project aims to get Java EE back on the edge of innovation, Sharples said. "The goal is to ensure that when developers think about microservices they start with Java and Java EE; this enables them to start with the standards-based platform with familiar Java APIs."

CIOs and CISOs share insights on strategic collaboration

All executives with a C-level title should be working together toward the mission, said Mansur Hasib, program chair for cybersecurity technology at the Graduate School at the University of Maryland University College and author of the books “Cybersecurity Leadership” and “The Impact of Security Culture on Security Compliance.” ... "The C-level officers should be sitting together and offering each perspective on how to achieve this particular goal. The CIO might say, ‘OK, to do this we need to have a webinar, and we might need connections with the mayor’s office and maybe the state department of health.’ Another officer could say, ‘We need to put some ads in the newspaper,’ and someone else might say, ‘We need some town halls because consumers do not have technology for webinars, and further, maybe some door-to-door canvassing.’"

Why Virtual Reality is Auto Marketing's 'Sleeping Giant'

Automakers are also bringing virtual reality inside dealerships. For instance, Audi is rolling out VR systems at dealerships that allow customers to experience vehicles in various environments or to "virtually dive into specific parts of the vehicle and explore their technical design," according to Audi's website. "You're wearing the glasses and you really think you're in the car," Marcus Kuehne, Audi's virtual-reality project lead,told Bloomberg earlier this year. "You get a good feeling for the size -- do the rims fit to the body of the car, do the colors inside the car fit well together?" he added. "You can judge this much better through this technology than on a screen."

Microsoft is rolling out Windows 10 as a subscription service

At the enterprise level, Microsoft has always charged businesses for using Windows. The upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 or 8 may be free, but the continued use of Windows in your business has never been free, nor should it be. The new twist in the conversation is that the fees for using Windows will be called a subscription now. Hardly earth shattering. At the consumer level, the future prospects of Windows 10 and the subscription model are much murkier. Where enterprises are willing to pay for more security assurances and management services, consumers may fail to see the value and resist a monthly fee. Microsoft knows this and will look for ways to mitigate such entrenched resistance.

Could Bulgaria's open source law transform government software worldwide?

The advantages of going open source are numerous, Bozhanov says. Most importantly, the new legislation will bring better written software, and developers will follow better practices. "Currently there's nobody inspecting the quality of the code or the architecture, and companies can get away with pretty low-quality solutions," he says. Open source will also offer more affordable software, with less money spent on support and fewer new projects commissioned simply because the old ones didn't work properly. Also, government contractors will be able to reuse the code when working on a common piece of functionality, without having to reinvent the wheel every time. "Companies will no longer be able to sell open-source solutions as complex custom software, which has [previously] happened," Bozhanov says.

The best mobile security plans examine risks first, then prescribe

The balance between risk and control is exacerbated when applied to mobile devices. Mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) are, by their very nature, designed to blend the organization and personal computing experiences. My phone is filled with personal photos and photos of whiteboard architecture and flow diagrams. My apps include my corporate email and expense approval as well as my personal mobile banking. ... When it comes to assessing risks, I like to first identify the specific risks and then, for each risk, define the likelihood and impact of the risk. I then figure out the best, most pragmatic way to mitigate the risks with the highest likelihood-impact combination.

Why ALM Is Becoming Indispensable in Safety-Critical Product Development

When developing complex software systems before, especially in scaled Agile environments, these issues are quite common. That's exactly the need that gave rise to the notion of Application Lifecycle Management. ALM tools help developers oversee and manage several (ideally all) stages of development using a single software solution. By design, they offer functionality across the entire lifecycle, supporting development from requirements to release. While ALM is a relatively modern concept, ALM solutions have been around for a decade or so, and have evolved a lot over the years. Some ALM vendors started out as developers of single-point solutions, and have developed further modules to add to the basic functionality of their products, or have acquired other solutions and created integrations between these preexisting modules.

Internet of Things in healthcare: What's next for IoT technology in the health sector

Inova Design's CEO Leon Marsh agrees: "The potential with IoT is that throughout a whole care pathway a person's data is continuously being gathered and used to help diagnose the patient so they can receive the best treatment as quickly as possible." Ideally, the objective data that could be taken from a network of IoT devices will also be able to significantly lower margins of error. And in the predictive realm, it could, for example, be able to detect the onset of a wide range of health issues, from high blood pressure to early signs of delirium. Emergency admissions could then, in theory, be reduced - with proactive health systems in place to address the problems before they become more serious or irreversible. More generally, data from a network of IoT devices has the potential to transform the check-in process, filling in past health data for professionals to review automatically.

Container Management Simplifies SDN Application Deployment

One of the problems that SDN companies attempted to tackle is the issue of firewall rule explosion. Firewall access control lists (ACLs) are notoriously difficult to understand and process. For example, a customer I worked with at a former company had 50,000 firewall rules on a single firewall device and they did not know if they could remove any one rule without breaking an application! Load balancers have similar problems as firewalls. With hundreds of applications, come thousands of rules that must reside in a single hardware load balancer. Clearly, there is a problem. One way to attempt to solve this problem is to create network application centricity. There are many network IT vendors that claim application-centric infrastructure and networking.

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

July 19, 2016

Cybersecurity control a concern for digital businesses

Gartner predicts that by 2018, 25% of corporate data traffic will bypass enterprise security controls and flow directly to the cloud from mobile devices. With data no longer restricted to data centers, it is important to stop trying to control information and instead determine how it flows, Pratap added. “Finding all sensitive data and tracking all access in all forms will be too onerous for most organizations,” she said. “Each organization will have to manage their ability to do this within the limits of the resources they can commit. From personally identifiable information to sensitive intellectual property, the impact of compromise of such information on the organization needs to be assessed regularly.”

From Pig to Spark: An Easy Journey to Spark for Apache Pig Developers

Pig has a lot of qualities: it is stable, scales very well, and integrates natively with the Hive metastore HCatalog. By describing each step atomically, it minimizes conceptual bugs that you often find in complicated SQL code. But sometimes, Pig has some limitations that makes it a poor programming paradigm to fit your needs. The three main limitations are : Pig is a pipeline and doesn’t offer loops or code indirections (IF..THEN) which can sometimes be mandatory in your code. ... Finally, a third Pig limitation is related to input data formats: whereas Pig is good with CSV and HCatalog, it seems a bit less comfortable with reading and processing some other data formats like JSON (through JsonLoader), whereas Spark integrates them natively.

Insurance is ready for an upgrade

Before too long, IoT may enable carriers to become primarily the ensurers of safety and productive use of properties, rather than just the insurers of damages should a loss occur. If IoT detects the imminent failure of a $100 compressor in a $1 million piece of equipment that prevents a $100 million business-interruption loss, an entirely new value chain is created. If carriers don’t seize the moment, outside tech firms could launch IoT platforms that already have an ingrained risk-transfer component, thereby beating insurers at their own game. Nor are life insurers immune to the disruptions caused by enhanced connectivity. More life carriers will likely take the plunge into telematics, including some utilizing a fitness-monitoring device to award points for those who exhibit healthy behaviors, thereby allowing policyholders to earn premium discounts and other rewards while facilitating a richer, more holistic relationship with their insurer.

Introduction to data-science tools in Bluemix – Part 3

A big part of any data science activity is learning how to put the data in a format that helps you gain insight. A common task is looking at the data in time segments, joining them on date patterns or time of year dates. In this recipe we will look at how we transform dates so they can be used as date formats rather than text strings. In addition we will look as joining data frames from multiple data sources. ... You will notice that the date is in format of “MMMM-YY”, this is a concern because the year is not specific. Because I know the data, I have made a rule in this case that everything less than 20 is for the year 2000 and beyond. Everything 20 and above is for the 1900’s. The next concern is that I need my date format in “YYYY_MM-DD” format and there is no “days” in the source date. I am going to default it to “01”

Europe Builds a Network for the Internet of Things. Will the Devices Follow?

For growth to accelerate, says de Smit, a few things are necessary. The first is for the KPN network to enable location-based features, which would, for instance, allow a shipping container to be tracked in transit across the country—something expected to go live before the end of 2016. The second is IoT coverage beyond national borders. Siemens, Shimano, and other large companies are very interested in gaining access to IoT networks, but only when there is enough geographic coverage, says de Smit. That may take a few years. KPN is not the only company building out the IoT. SigFox, a French startup, claims its competing wireless grid already covers 340 million people in parts of 22 countries. The company raised well over $100 million in investment in 2015 alone, and is using the money to expand as rapidly as possible.

Red Hat Shoots to Solve Container Storage with Gluster and OpenShift

The integration translates to another option for storing data inside containers. That’s important because, to date, other persistent storage solutions for containers have tended to be clunky. Here’s why: Docker containers are ephemeral. They spin up and down as needed, which is what makes containerized infrastructure so scalable and agile. But it also makes it hard to store data persistently, since you can’t store permanent data inside containers very effectively if the containers themselves are not permanent. Previous attempts to solve this conundrum have centered on creating special containers dedicated to storage, or allowing containerized apps to access storage on the host system.

Organising for Analytics Success - Centralising vs. Decentralising

As we know the analytics team needs to have an acute understanding of the business and business unit they are working in. To be able to build models and derive insights its important that there is some context to the objectives of the business unit as well as the problem the analytics team is solving for. It's based on this premise, then, that many Heads of Analytics (and similar) believe that analytics has to be decentralised. Deploy a Head of Analytics into each business unit, allow them to work alongside the business owners and build insights with specific knowledge of the customer and the product. This structure makes perfect sense. Except when you take into account that there is a distinct lack of skills when it comes to people who can build advanced analytical models; and understand business; and have the ability to lead a team and engage with business.

Chief data officer job stakes claim in data innovation

We forget, but, before big data and analytics became the mainstays, shops would take all of their data out of transactional systems, build a data warehouse, do some data cleansing and run some reports and, maybe, if you were really, really good, that could become the golden copy of your data, which you could send back to your applications. That's what we called the closed loop. It was data warehouse nirvana. But the IT and application development groups would have their release cycles, and the data warehouse group would have its release cycles. Never the two would meet, and they didn't really care about each other. Now, the big data platform has really become the back end of some of the applications, especially for analytics like recommendation engines and applications that measure customers' propensity to buy.

5 steps to avoid overcommitting resources on your IT projects

Maureen Carlson, Partner, Appleseed Partners, says, "Not enough companies are connecting the dots about the impact of resource overcommitment and the ability to deliver on innovation to meet growth objectives. The research shows that companies are working on products or projects that are at risk of delayed delivery because there was not enough capacity to take them on in the first place. Mature organizations are in a position to evaluate capacity in real-time to make critical business tradeoffs and see continued investment in this area as a competitive differentiator." ... PMOs play a crucial role in assisting organizations with strategy and execution and as such must recognize the need for effective resource management and capacity planning.

Has open source become the default business model for enterprise software?

When it comes building the business, open source and proprietary are the same -- but different. The biggest difference is starting points. The proprietary software company starts with an idea that is refined based on identifying customer pain points and classic gap analysis. With open source, the trigger is less formal, because at the outset, the primary risk is sweat equity. Somebody gets an idea, develops it in the wild, and in place of gap analysis, there's the sink-or-swim process of developer interest going viral. But, ultimately, both need to deliver some unique value-add, scale it, and go to market. There is the neatness, or lack thereof, of the open-source model. Witness the long tail of adoption of Android updates, or the ordered disorder of the Hadoop platform, where each commercial platform has different mixes and matches of open-source projects.

Quote for the day:

"To double your net worth, double your self-worth. Because you will never exceed the height of your self-image." -- Robin Sharma