Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - April 18, 2017

Five Pitfalls To Avoid When Migrating To The Cloud

"This is part of the learning curve," said Deepak Mohan, an analyst with IDC. "The negatives are attributed to the cloud and not to these mistakes that need to be corrected... If a company does not realize the cost savings and they fail to see the results they thought they'd get, the result is that there is a drop in faith and a lowering of confidence in your cloud strategy. And that will cause a slowdown in adoption." Part of the issue is that the cloud is really a different beast for a lot of IT shops. ... "What we learned is that while it's easy to get started, cloud is completely different from IT," said Temujin Baker, senior manager of engineering and architecture for King County, Wash. "How you run your business in the cloud is different than how you run it" on premises. "There are changes in how you do your work, the skills that are needed, the process."

Software preservationists look ahead to enterprise focus

Software archiving is nothing new, from organizations such as Archive.org, Bitsavers.org, the federal government's National Software Reference Laboratory, and many smaller players who've all been working for years to post applications online for public download or at least for browser-based emulation. It never was easy, and now it's becoming more difficult. Preservationists are joining resources because they realize that programs are going cloud-native, upgrades are increasingly transparent to users, and how do you take snapshots of a program that's reliant on constantly changing infrastructure? "The Software Preservation Network (SPN), we make no claims that we're the first people," noted SPN's Jessica Meyerson, a digital archivist at the University of Texas at Austin. "Many archivists, information professionals, and just individuals... have become the caretakers and maintainers of legacy software just because they see the value in doing so. "

Why strong cybersecurity means giving ex-employees the cold shoulder

A cybersecurity best practice is to always avoid becoming the low-hanging fruit, and by making hackers work just a little bit harder your property could avoid a potential digital break-in. While Rodriguez likely had insider knowledge of Marriott’s internal systems and processes, it’s possible that following proper security protocol could have prevented, or deterred, his actions. At the recent Serviced Apartment Summit Americas event, hosted April 11 at the New York Marriott Downtown, Matthew Baker, senior associate at Katten Law, said data breaches in hotels are increasing in number and sophistication. Baker said one of the biggest threats to hotel security is vulnerabilities found in third-party contractors, and called for better and more thorough vetting before entering into digital partnerships.

Can AI and ML slay the healthcare ransomware dragon?

“Attackers can simply move to different techniques – for example non-malware attacks that do not use binaries but scripts or macros – which are much harder to train/learn from an AI/ML perspective. Any preventative technology that relies on the classification of good or bad is always susceptible to the arms race,” he said. Reza Chapman, managing director of cybersecurity in Accenture’s health practice, said maintaining the effectiveness of AI/ML can require significant maintenance. “Detection thresholds need to be adjusted to reach a balance between false alarm rate and missed detection rate,” he said. “Further, constant tuning is often necessary within the specific operation environment. Overall, this is not a reason to steer away from these technologies. Instead, consider AI and ML as complementary to the personnel in your security program.”

Tips for Disinfecting Your Data Center

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that technology alone will never solve the problem. Perfect email filters will cause the bad guys to use the phone. Perfect phone filters lead them to target peoples’ personal social media accounts. Close one door and they will find another—it’s not unlike those movies where the thief always gets the loot or the painting, no matter how many layers of security are employed. But there is something you can do about it. “Training and education has to be is part of the solution to make people aware of these attacks, how they can detect, stop and report them,” wrote Sjouwerman. End-user Internet Security Awareness Training is all about teaching users not to do silly things like clicking on suspect URLs in emails, or opening attachments that let in the bad hats. Sjouwerman recommended putting all staff through such training.

New Breed of DDoS Attack On the Rise

"CLDAP reflection works in the same way as any other UDP-based reflection attack," Arteaga says. "[But] the amplification of the response is impressive compared to most other vectors," he says. On average, Akamai observed CLDAP-enabled DDoS attacks achieving amplifications of over 56%. The largest attack using CLDAP as the sole vector that Akamai has mitigated so far had a peak bandwidth of 24 Gigabits per second, or about two million packets per second. "These attacks are averaging around 3 gigabits per second—a pretty impressive number considering the limited number of available reflectors," ... CLDAP uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for communication. UDP does not validate source IP addresses, thereby making application-layer protocols that rely on it—such as CLDAP—good vectors for launching DDoS attacks.

IOT Meets Augmented Reality

A lot of time people will use ThingWorx in the factory, collecting information from sensors and controllers and various other pieces of hardware. ThingWorx is a great tool for aggregating that information. But it can also bring in data from other digital resources, such as CAD and PLM and even ERP. Really what all of this is about is allowing you to create a digital twin of what’s happening out there in the physical world. You’ve got some smart, connected product in the world, you want to be able to have a digital equivalent of it so you can understand how it’s being operated, predict when it’s going to fail, make sure it’s operating most efficiently. The digital twin is getting more and more airplay. What goes into the digital twin? Ideally it’s everything you would ever want to know about that thing. In practical use cases, what do you care about? A digital twin could be a set of properties and their current attributes. It could be rich 3D information.

Samsung Galaxy S8 makes every other phone feel like a cinder block

For years, Apple has touted "thinner and lighter" as the hallmarks of each new release of the iPhone. With the Galaxy S8, Samsung has beat Apple to the punch in a big way. The S8+ makes the iPhone 7 Plus and the Google Pixel XL feel like cinder blocks by comparison. With an almost bezel-less screen that covers 83% of the front of the phone, the S8+ has a 6.2-inch screen that offers extra functional real estate at the same time. Again, it makes the iPhone 7 Plus and the Pixel XL look outdated by comparison. ... Going into testing the Galaxy S8 Plus, my biggest concern was battery life since the S8 Plus actually has a slightly smaller battery than last year's Galaxy S7 Edge (and that phone sometimes struggles to get through a full day). However, because of the S8's new 10nm processor and some nice power management features in the software, the S8 has ridiculously good battery life.

Risky Business – The Valuation of Data Breaches

How can you calculate the value of a data breach in your organisation and implement an effective mitigation strategy? This is the question that Todd Forgie answers in his fascinating presentation, originally delivered at CLOUDSEC Singapore. You can either read the summary below, which includes Forgie's key recommendations, or watch the video at the end of the article. Forgie is the Vice President of IT and Managed Services at MEDHOST, a healthcare IT company in the US that services about 25% of hospitals in the US and Puerto Rico. He explains that due to the huge growth in the estimated number of successful cyber-attacks and ransomware, it's now critical for organisations to operate with the assumption of a breach. ... But in order to make this happen, his organisation had to accurately model the level of risk being faced and the value attributed to that risk.

A blueprint for the modern government security operations center

Moderate- to high-risk actions should not be automated. Start by examining what could go wrong if an automated action is taken incorrectly. Generate as many scenarios as possible to try to discover circumstances in which the action could cause damage. From my experience, remediation steps like blocking IPs or disconnecting users should not be automated. Scale must also be considered when deciding which processes are appropriate for automation. For example, running a tool against a single system to gather some information can be automated when performed on a small scale, but if the same action is run on thousands of hosts, it can have a detrimental effect on the network stability. For these types of actions, set thresholds for type, amount and time frame of automated activities to protect the network.

Quote for the day:

"The greatest single human gift - the ability to chase down our dreams." -- Prof. Hobby

Daily Tech Digest - April 17, 2017

Has Retail Security Technology Gone Too Far?

The most common and highly visible form of retail security technology that shoppers will encounter is radio-frequency identification (RFID). As explained by OCS Retail Support, RFID tags and scanners work by having individual items give off unique frequencies embedded with information, and having scanners (often in the doorway) pick up this information. If an item leaves the store without being paid for, an alarm will sound, alerting shop staff to the shoplifter (or accidental shoplifter). Amazon Go have already announced that they will be using a variant of this technology to facilitate their checkout-less payments, with purchases being registered when customers leave the store. Other retailers may follow suit. Though perhaps a little intrusive by nature, this form of technology has not caused indignation amongst privacy campaigners.

Honesty is not the best privacy policy

For starters, it's probably a good idea to create fake Facebook and Twitter accounts now so they can have a history by the time you need them. Best practices around this deception haven't been fully developed by security experts, but it probably begins with using your real picture for the fake accounts and a picture of something other than your face for the real ones. When border agents demand the passwords to your social accounts, you can give them access to the fake accounts. Increasingly, people with business or other secrets may buy a second phone to carry while traveling, and leave the real one behind — or at least in checked luggage. And finally, there's the pollution solution, as demonstrated by MIT's Steven Smith. You probably won't have to roll your own. I expect to see an emerging industry of traffic-spoofing browser plug-ins and something similar for messaging apps.

How will future cars stay up-to-date? Make them open like a PC

“There’s going to be pressure to keep the software up-to-date, and not to use hardware beyond an expiration date,” Perens said. He himself has gone through at least six mobile phones over the course of owning his 2007 Toyota Prius, and wonders how future cars will keep up with rapid technological changes. “We haven’t seen much discussion about it, so we thought this might kick things off,” Determann said. Their open car idea may sound like a threat to the auto industry. But every car vendor has a vision for their future business, Determann said. And for some, it may include a degree of openness. He can imagine partnerships between automakers and software vendors to support the tech features in next-generation cars. In that way, “we might see more open and closed cars competing on the road,” he said.

Debating IoT security at MIT Connected Things

The first is to think about security systematically in those situations (typically industrial and other commercial uses) where devices are managed and the manufacturer presumably has a formal responsibility for ongoing updates and patches and maintains some sort of control. Brandon Freeman of Leidos said that there are two questions that he always asks suppliers, “What’s your lifecycle update process? When have you pen [penetration] tested the device?” The second is to acknowledge that low-cost, whether consumer or industrial, endpoint devices are going to be problematic to secure. I made this point recently and it was echoed by a number of speakers throughout the day; it’s just not viable economically to expect updates of essentially disposable devices. ... As United Technologies’ Isaac Chute put it, “Should we be doing some things differently? It comes down to having a different trust model. Things are too complex for the average person.”

Why So Many Businesses Mess Up Employee Development

Good leaders know how to listen, but strong listening skills are rare. Focus some managerial training on active listening, which is crucial to communication. Active listening is a technique that requires the listener to fully concentrate on the content being shared and to develop a strong understanding of it. This helps the listener gain insight into the employee’s perspective and provide effective input. Training management on this skill is pretty simple. The basic tips to emphasize may sound like common sense, but they need to translate into a practice they use daily. They should pay attention, acknowledge the message and look at the speaker directly. Body language such as nodding, smiling and maintaining an upright posture show they are listening and are engaged in the discussion. After the employee voices their perspective, managers should follow up by paraphrasing to reflect back their points and ask for clarification when needed.

How Accountants Can Help Clients Avoid Data Breaches

Because there are a lot of similarities in different types of data breach scenarios, Verizon has opened up the cyber case files in our second annual Data Breach Digest (DBD) so that industries can strengthen their network security processes. The DBD details 16 real-world data breach scenarios based on their prevalence and/or lethality in the field. It is important for organizations to understand how to identify signs of a data breach and important sources of evidence so they can investigate, contain and recover from a breach as fast as possible. Given today’s highly charged cybercrime environment, CPAs can play a vital role in helping their clients become aware of commonly used tactics to better protect financial assets. It’s important to understand that timing is critical when it comes to incident response. The reality is, cybercriminals can break in and steal data in a matter of minutes.

Low-Code Platforms: The Ultimate In Consumerization Of Enterprise Tech

Not only are low-code platforms easy to use, they also follow rapid application development methodologies, which helps in building a prototype quickly. Citizen developers can create a minimum viable product, ready to be used, 4-7 times faster than that created using traditional coding. Citizen developers are typically business managers who are closer to the problem and are best suited to develop a solution. So instead of creating and maintaining multiple apps for each and every department, an IT department can just train people from each department to use low-code platforms, and enable them to fulfil their own app demands. In fact, Gartner predicts that IT will evolve into bimodal IT, where the department primarily focuses on strategy with stability and efficiency in mind, while shifting the development portion to the business units that need it.

Microchip implants help employees access data

The practice, in which employees at Epicenter, a Swedish innovation house, become chip-enabled, has been widely reported on—but the headlines have been somewhat misleading. A party, like the one held in 2014, is held there about once a quarter. The employees are not quite "cyborgs," and they are not asked to implant chips against their will. The company does not pay the cost, and there is no HR policy that encourages it. Epicenter has a member base of about 2000 people from over 300 companies, and only about six of the employees at Epicenter have had chips implanted. The technology, it must be noted, is not new. These kinds of chips have been used to track pets, or deliveries. But having them implanted in humans raises concerns about privacy risks.

How self-driving cars can change your cloud strategy

Every enterprise of any size is now or soon will become a cloud-based company. The issue then is not whether to use the cloud but how to extract the best value from it. Alongside that cloud subscription comes a wave of bits from the exponential growth of devices: from cars to wall widgets returning environmental data, all that information needs to be stored and analysed if it is to add value. For manufacturers and resellers of technology such as IoT devices, this looks like an extension of existing business models, as such companies already offer services on the back of hardware and software sales. However, this may not be a familiar business model to companies not involved in the tech industry. Yet, because of today's reliance by all enterprises on technology, exploiting the data for which the company has already paid makes a lot of sense.

Cars and the IoT: The lane lines are blurring

Of course you can argue that the IoT in some form has existed for decades, but we're talking about what the progression of Moore's Law has wrought in the modern day. Moore's Law is salient because in the majority of organizations that have an IoT business practice, division, subsidiary, product or service line, etc., the origins often came from something to do with semiconductors. This is understandable since the modern era of IoT, literally from the time the term first began floating around, started with devices, a.k.a., things. That were connected to the internet. For a long while, it's been about getting things out there and connected. In concert with the IoT showing up in non-mobile form, in environments and instances ranging from home thermostats to enormous factories, there's been a gradual introduction of connected, microprocessor-based devices that are mobile.

Quote for the day:

"Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence." -- Godfrey Reggio

Daily Tech Digest - April 16, 2017

The 4 Types Of Data Science Problems Companies Face

The data science process is extensively covered by resources all over the web and known by everyone. A data scientist connects to data, splits it or merges it, cleans it, builds features, trains a model, deploys it to assess performance, and iterates until they’re happy with it. That’s not the end of the story though. Next, you need to try the model on real data and enter the production environment. These two environments are inherently different because the production environment is continuously running – and potentially impacting existing internal or external systems. Data is constantly coming in, being processed and computed into KPIs, and going through models that are retrained frequently. These systems, more often than not, are written in different languages than the data science environment.

What performance metrics do developers value and when do they feel most productive?

Interestingly, the top two answers, "Communication skills" (4.10 on a five-point scale) and "Track record of getting things done" (4.09), aren't usually explicitly quantifiable criteria. They're also things you can get across before even getting an interview using a strong resume or cover letter, respectively. Of course, hard skills are also very important, as we see knowledge of algorithms, data, and frameworks filling out the next two top spots. Once you've picked the right people, you need to ensure they're collaborating effectively, which is why Stack Overflow also asked about favored development practices:

Optimizing your application architecture at the ‘federated edge’

To craft high-performance IoT apps, developers need a federated environment that distributes algorithmic capabilities for execution at IoT network endpoints, also known as “edge devices.” Federation is essential because many IoT edge devices — such as mobile phones — lack sufficient local resources for storing all data and executing all the algorithms needed to do their jobs effectively. Key among the capabilities being federated to the IoT edges are machine learning, deep learning and other cognitive-computing algorithms. These analytic capabilities enable IoT edge devices ... to make decisions and take actions autonomously based on locally acquired sensor data. In particular, these algorithms drive the video recognition, motion detection, natural-language processing, clickstream processing and other real-time pattern-sensing applications upon which IoT apps depend.

Self-taught artificial intelligence beats doctors at predicting heart attacks

“This is high-quality work,” says Evangelos Kontopantelis, a data scientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom who works with primary care databases. He says that dedicating more computational power or more training data to the problem “could have led to even bigger gains.” Several of the risk factors that the machine-learning algorithms identified as the strongest predictors are not included in the ACC/AHA guidelines, such as severe mental illness and taking oral corticosteroids. Meanwhile, none of the algorithms considered diabetes, which is on the ACC/AHA list, to be among the top 10 predictors. Going forward, Weng hopes to include other lifestyle and genetic factors in computer algorithms to further improve their accuracy.

Chatbots: The Hottest Thing In Tech Right Now

Chatbots are the biggest innovation in customer service ever since businesses created web portals for customers to serve themselves. Email and live chat may have increased the interaction between firms and clients. However, chatbots are available 24 hours a day and will interact with customers in the same way a human would. Since most customer queries do not require human intervention, chatbots save you money by automating your customer service. You can now put an end to automated email replies and unavailable live chat services. ... One of the reasons chatbots may herald the end of apps is that they speak the same language as the user. The language used by apps to interact with customers is frankly, not engaging or friendly.

How we learned to talk to computers, and how they learned to answer back

There are many challenges that ASR engines need to address. For example, recognition accuracy is affected by the quality of the microphone used, and by the level of background noise. Refinements in signal processing and acoustic modelling help to create more noise-robust speech recognition, which is especially important as ASR use cases move from relatively quiet offices and homes to noisier mobile environments. People's accents and speaking styles also vary widely, of course, which is why most ASR systems benefit from the creation of user profiles from supplied training texts, so the decoder can fine-tune its "speaker-independent" acoustic model. People may also use words that are not in the language model or the lexicon, so the software also needs to be able to add "out of vocabulary" words and record their pronunciation.

A Beginner's Guide to Information Architecture

In short - we don’t have much patience when it comes to bad user experience. As a result, near perfection has become a must to survive in the competitive tech environment. The job of an information architect is to maintain a competitive advantage by making sure things are where they should be, and believe me, it’s not always easy. As you’ll soon discover, there is a lot to think about. So what do we really mean by IA? I’ll begin by explaining, in layman’s terms, what it means. If you scroll down, you’ll find 8 easy principles that highlight some crucial things to think about when designing the IA of a website. Further down, I explain the many ways that good IA will benefit both the user and your bottom line, and finally I share some handy processes to get you started, plus a list useful tools to use when designing the IA of a site.

Automation and Lean: Scaling up the Lean Value Chain

In today’s world of disruptive technology innovation, needless to say that Lean Principles apply to any field of IT, and as we will see now, Lean Principles also apply to more than just manual processes in IT environment. About Ericsson: Ericsson is a global leader in delivering ICT solutions, carrying over 40% of the world's mobile traffic through its networks. It has customers in over 180 countries and comprehensive industry solutions ranging from Cloud services and Mobile Broadband to Network Design and Optimization. In our service delivery unit IT & Cloud (SDU IT&C), we commenced the Lean Journey with small steps around five years ago. We selected a few important KPIs aligned with the organization’s strategy and initiated lean transformation programs on those areas which helped us by delivering consistently on the following parameters

Learning to Love Intelligent Machines

There is no going back, only forward. We don’t get to pick and choose when technological progress stops or where. People whose jobs are on the chopping block of automation are afraid that the current wave of tech will impoverish them, but they also depend on the next wave of technology to generate the economic growth that is the only way to create sustainable new jobs. I understand that it is far easier to tell millions of newly redundant workers to “retrain for the information age” or to “join the entrepreneurial economy” than to be one of them or to actually do it. And who can say how quickly all that new training will also become worthless? What professions today can be called “computer proof”? ... Compare what a child can do with an iPad in a few minutes to the knowledge and time it took to do basic tasks with a PC just a decade ago. These advances in digital tools mean that less training and retraining are required for those whose jobs are taken by robots.

Moving towards a ‘Zero-Friction’ PaaS

In a nutshell, a serverless platform needs the application developers to think and write business logic in the form of functions which are invoked when an event is dispatched to the system. Event streams are central to Serverless Architectures especially in AWS’s Lambda implementation. Any interaction with the platform such as an user’s request or mutation of state such as updating an object in the data store generates events, which is streamed into a user defined function for processing the event and accomplishes any domain specific concerns. ... Companies like Netflix, Google, and Facebook have invested significantly in this area during the course of building modern platforms for their consumer facing services. Each of these companies have a proven track record for their quality of service despite running on commodity hardware and network.

Quote for the day:

"The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Daily Tech Digest - April 15, 2017

Let's talk about how we talk about blockchain

The characteristics of third generation DLTs are shifting markedly, and the blockchain vernacular is losing some of its mystique. Decentralisation distinguished the first generation blockchain, and some still say it’s essential. But let’s remember that the public blockchains don’t actually produce decentralisation; they are designed with decentralization as a starting point. Nakamoto rejected financial institutions, and the Bitcoin blockchain was designed to handle e-cash with no central authority. Yet nothing in the original design indicated that decentralisation could fit all types of business, nor that the blockchain could decentralise anything other than e-cash. Immutability is another word that’s becoming a bit stale. In my nearly twenty years experience in cybersecurity prior to blockchain, I don’t recall “immutability” ever being expressed as a requirement.

The Democratization of Machine Learning: What It Means for Tech Innovation

Market-based access to data and algorithms will lower entry barriers and lead to an explosion in new applications of AI. As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data and computing resources needed to train and launch sophisticated AI algorithms. Small startups and individuals simply didn’t have access and were effectively blocked out of the market. That changes now. The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance to get their ideas off the ground and prove their concepts before raising the funds needed to scale. ... There is an effort underway to standardize and improve access across all layers of the machine learning stack, including specialized chipsets, scalable computing platforms, software frameworks, tools and ML algorithms.

Decoding banks digital customers’ expectations

Most banks’ customer strategies, fueled by customer analytics, will need to change to really take advantage of customers’ new channel preferences, for many different researches show that consumers who have grown up immersed in digital technologies, are two to three times more likely to want more digital interactions than what banks currently support, yet older customers are becoming surprisingly open to adding other channels to their portfolio and are increasingly experimenting with online interactions, using a wider variety of contact channels and apps. As a result, customers from all ages find it easier to compare a bank’s or financial institution’s promise with its delivery and how the overall experience meets their own expectations and, subsequently, make changes if they consider their bank isn’t as digitally ready as they would want it to be.

Search the world's largest cybercrime library

"The repository enables lawmakers to draw upon the database of legislation when drafting laws on cybercrime or electronic evidence," said Loide Lungameni, chief of the UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime) Organized Crime Branch. " ... Established in conjunction with the 2013 Comprehensive Study on Cybercrime, the database is a response to the explosion of global connectivity at "a time of economic and demographic transformations, with rising income disparities, tightened private sector spending, and reduced financial liquidity." "Upwards of 80 percent of cybercrime acts are estimated to originate in some form of organized activity," the study determined, "with cybercrime black markets established on a cycle of malware creation, computer infection, botnet management, harvesting of personal and financial data, data sale, and 'cashing out' of financial information."

Last Words: Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning

Where has Deep Learning helped NLP? The gains so far have not so much been from true Deep Learning as from the use of distributed word representations—through the use of real-valued vector representations of words and concepts. Having a dense, multidimensional representation of similarity between all words is incredibly useful in NLP, but not only in NLP. Indeed, the importance of distributed representations evokes the “Parallel Distributed Processing” mantra of the earlier surge of neural network methods, which had a much more cognitive-science directed focus (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986). It can better explain human-like generalization, but also, from an engineering perspective, the use of small dimensionality and dense vectors for words allows us to model large contexts, leading to greatly improved language models.

AI and robots will take our jobs - but better ones will emerge for us

Innovation is the only sustainable way to make society wealthier and better off. In terms of real GDP, Americans are on average more than eight times wealthier today than they were in 1917 2. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth was practically the only person wearing silk stockings. In the 21st century, any American woman can. A similar point holds true for cars, plumbing, electricity, and a variety of other modern wonders that began as luxury goods. When technological unemployment occurs, laid-off workers seek retraining and private sector leaders create transitional infrastructure to reabsorb them into the economy. Innovative technologies create more wealth and better jobs in the end by eliminating unpleasant rote work and increasing overall productivity. In the past 30 years, we have experienced a complicated period of globalisation.

How Digital Transformation Will Affect The Automotive Industry

Today already 40 million people use app-enabled carpooling services, and the usage of ridehailing apps has grown rapidly to over 70 million users. Frost & Sullivan’s mobility research has highlighted the continued trend of the automotive industry investing in dedicated collaborations. “As information services, in particular, become more sophisticated, the potential to integrate and aggregate mobility services is increasing,” explains Shwetha Surender, Program Manager Mobility. This allows users to plan, book and pay for their journeys on the smartphone in real time. To make this effective, partnerships between both private and public transport providers are essential. The revenue potential of such digital mobility services is expected to rise to ~$2 trillion by 2025 globally, explaining the continued interest from the private sector.

Fintech start-ups put banks under pressure

Startups have the advantage of being free of legacy technology systems and tough regulation, both of which limit the digital developments of established financial services firms. As a result, start-up companies can more efficiently create mobile-focused services or products that threaten existing financial companies. For example, a number of mobile-based banks such as Atom, Tandem, Starling and Monzo have emerged in the past year with the aim of offering current accounts that help customers to manage their money and lifestyle. Some fintech start-ups pose a direct threat by capitalising on weaknesses and gaps left by established companies. Nutmeg in the UK, for example, provides low-cost online wealth management, which makes investment expertise accessible to millions of people who cannot afford advice but do not have the confidence to go it alone.

NSA's arsenal of Windows hacking tools have leaked

The dump of Windows exploits -- arguably affecting the most people and organizations and likely to cause the most damage and embarrassment to the intelligence agency -- has been expected since the hacking group first emerged on the scene last year. In case you missed it, hacking tools that were confirmed to belong to the NSA's so-called Equation Group were stolen last year in one of the biggest breaches of classified files since the Edward Snowden revelations. These tools, allowed NSA analysts to break into a range of systems, network equipment, and firewalls, and most recently tools to target the Linux operating system -- many of which were old and outdated. The group attempted to auction off the files but failed, and have been releasing portions of the stolen files in stages.

Are UK IT contractors leaving the sinking Brexit ship?

Ever since the UK shocked the world (and, maybe, itself) by voting to exit the European Union, pundits have prognosticated on what effects this will have on the economy and society. While many think it’s too early to say, UK skills sourcing company Arrows Group broke cover and came out with a notable statement, suggesting that Brexit is already leading to a 10 per cent reduction in skilled tech workers from within the EU relocating to the UK. Conversely, the company says there is an increase in UK digital skills heading elsewhere, notably Switzerland. The Arrows database used for this research only covers about 2,000 contractors but as an early indicator of what is going on its insights might have some value. With that caveat, I followed up with Arrows founder and CEO James Parsons and the following is a lightly edited version of our email exchange.

Quote for the day:

"A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind." -- Joseph Weizenbaum

Daily Tech Digest - April 14, 2017

3 Overlooked Attributes of a Great Chief Digital Officer

Confronting the tidal wave known as digitization, some CEOs call for a lifeboat in the form of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO). The CDO helps a company respond quickly and strategically, to the rapidly evolving digital landscape. There are several qualities that every CDO needs. To start, they need an innovative mind and great skill at communication. Those are obvious. “It’s really about [developing] a set of capabilities—around customer engagement, digital marketing, using algorithms to adjust the way the company works—not about a title,” says Martha Heller, President of executive search firm Heller Search Associates. Here are three less-obvious qualities that Heller says make CDOs effective

The Future of Application Development Is Here and it Is Cognitive-First

The DataRPM platform automates predictive modeling, leveraging proprietary Meta Learning capabilities to increase quality, accuracy and timeliness of equipment failure predictions by more than 300 percent. The technology enables customers such as Jaguar, Samsung and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to predict and prevent asset failures, reduce maintenance costs, optimize inventory and resources, predict quality issues, forecast warranty and insurance claims and manage risks effectively. Imagine, analyzing a massive volume of data, with hundreds of different variables, concurrently, within hours and leveraging that data to drive the business applications of the future? This is what Progress will deliver and we’ll do it in a way that is easy and affordable for businesses of any size.

Analysing distributed architectures in the era of IoT

Design and architecture phases must aim at conceiving a structure able to easily provide data and services to a multitude of unrelated devices. Third generation consumers, like wearable devices, personal and support equipment, sensors and actuators, and more in general any electrical appliance, should be easily pluggable and require the lowest integration and maintenance efforts, without any structural integration. The consequence is simple: we cannot architect our applications as they were isolated islands, self-contained and device/platform dependent. We must provide easy access to the information processed by our software, easing the fruition from devices potentially unknown.

Communicate IT’s Business Benefits More Effectively

Over half of IT leaders see themselves as part of a cost center or service provider, and only 4% are highly satisfied with IT’s communication with the rest of the business. This survey points out the risks and costs of these sorts of order-taker relationships, including loss of credibility and low level of engagement with business partners. Today’s CIOs acknowledge the problem, but many are struggling with how to address it. In fact, the same CEC survey found that 89% of IT leaders report at least one significant barrier to effective communication. How can you show the company the benefits IT is bringing, and help them to process and understand that story? The first step is to accept the inadequacy of working in silence while hoping the company understands the impact you are having.

95% of Organizations Have Employees Seeking to Bypass Security Controls

“Insider breaches are a growing threat to virtually all organizations including mainframe users,” says John Crossno, product manager of Compuware’s security solutions group, which recently released a tool designed to mitigate the threat. The increasing number of incidents where employees fall prey to phishing and other social engineering attacks and hand over authorized user credentials to attackers have made even otherwise secure mainframe environments vulnerable, he says. He points to the massive data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in 2015 as one example of how attackers are able to gain access to critical mainframe systems by acquiring the valid credentials to do it. In the mainframe environment, “enterprises have traditionally relied on insufficient methods to identify threats including disparate logs and data gathered by security products to piece together user behavior,” he says.

‘Cloud adoption and escalating threats accelerate encryption deployments’

The report revealed enterprises have accelerated adoption of encryption strategies, with 41% of respondents saying their organisation has an encryption strategy applied consistently across the enterprise. Notably, for the first time in the study’s 12-year history, business unit leaders have a higher influence over encryption strategy than IT operations. Other critical findings demonstrate organisations continue to show a preference for control over encryption and key management when those activities migrate to the cloud. John Grimm, senior director of security strategy at Thales e-Security, said that “This year’s findings align with key trends demonstrating an increased reliance on the cloud, ever-evolving internal and external threats, and new data sources mandating stronger protection.

Blockchain 101: How This Next Big Service Will Change The Future

Setting up your own Blockchain is not easy. It requires heavy infrastructure and development capabilities that most businesses aren’t savvy enough to manage. Enter BaaS. As more companies discover the power of Blockchain and what it can do for their businesses, there will be even greater demand for making this technology more easily accessible. According to Harvard Business Review, Blockchain is the next great disruptor, even more likely to change the next decade of business than big data or artificial intelligence (AI). Says the writer, just as the internet was the first native digital medium for information, Blockchain is the first native digital medium for value. Some 65 percent of banks are expected to implement a Blockchain solution in the next few years—and that’s just on the finance side. The technology is set to see a massive explosion throughout the business landscape.

Multi Or Hybrid? Dealing With A Complicated Cloud World

“We’re seeing conversations shift towards multiple clouds, not one single technology,” said Simon Crawley-Trice, director of global solutions & services for EMEA at Rackspace. “I think it’s going to be a combination between hybrid and multi-cloud depending on what’s right for the business.” “A lot of service providers tend to lead with the technology, but CIOs want a business conversation around what is the business value of hybrid cloud? They want to know what the business value is of consuming these different cloud technologies.” Cockerton agreed, highlighting that “ultimately the conversation is going to become one of the right workload in the right place at the right price. That’s going to determine the conversation for the next 10 years”.

The AI revolution: Is the future finally now?

Despite the mounting interest and the proliferation of new technologies, is this current wave that much different than what we have seen in the past? Do the techniques of the modern AI movement – machine learning, data mining, deep learning, natural language processing and neural nets – deserve to be captured under the AI moniker, or is it just more of the same? In the earlier peaks of interest, the broad set of activities that were typically bunched together under the term ‘AI’ were reserved for the labs and, if they ever saw the light of day, they were severely constrained by what the technology of the day could deliver and were limited by cost constraints. Many of the algorithms and structures central to AI have been known for some time; rather, previous surges of AI had unrealistic expectations of immediate consumer applications that could never be accomplished given limitations of the data and techniques available at the time.

Augmented reality in financial services

Within a bank, AR has the potential to transform productivity. Data visualisation is a key tool for traders needing to make important data-driven decisions quickly. AR can help traders view, analyse and manipulate large quantities of complex data faster through a more intuitive AR interface. Several companies have trialled Oculus Rift to create immersive 3D virtual reality environments for analysing data. Citibank has taken the next step by using Microsoft’s HoloLens headset to create Holographic Workstations for traders. These headsets use AR to layer complex data sets that enable traders to visualise and make decisions collaboratively with clients. We can expect to see more AR in bank offices in the future. With the rapid growth in mobile banking apps and introduction of digital-only banks, there are more and more questions about the future role of branches.

Quote for the day:

"We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software." -- Tim O'Reilly