Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - June 07, 2017

Kanban: Real Scaled Agility For Your Enterprise

Generally speaking, the aim of Agile scaling methods is to apply larger Agile wrappers around clusters of Agile teams in order to re-establish some kind of hierarchical structure needed to manage the interdependencies described above. Whether its a Release Train or a Nexus, or whatever else, the idea is that there is an “Agile Team of Teams” managing the interdependencies of multiple, smaller teams. As long as the total number of people doesn’t grow beyond the Dunbar number (~150), the Dunbar-sized group is dedicated and cross-functional, there is a team managing the interdependencies within the Dunbar, there are no dependencies outside of the Dunbar and there is some cadence (1-3 months) of integrated delivery—it’s still “Agile”. All of this scaling out as far as a Dunbar (and only that far) allows the enterprise to still “be Agile”—Scaled Agile.

IoT security regulation coming, warns Bruce Schneier

The real problem, however, said Schneier is that nothing incents a government to do something “stupid” like fear, which is why the information security industry has to get involved. “The choice is not between regulation and no regulation. The choice is between smart regulation and stupid regulation, and if we don’t want regulation to be imposed on us from the outside with little thought and little time, we need to start thinking about this and getting ahead of this because it is coming,” he said. “It will take just one disaster before your government, my government or both will do something, and they will do the thing they can grab the quickest, so we have to ensure that it is something that is also smart.” In the past, Schneier said security has largely been left up to the market, which although “not great” has worked “mostly OK” but these imperfect solutions have been OK because the effects of failure have been fairly limited.

3 steps to better IT career management

Historically, career advice began by counseling wannabe world-beaters that vertical market choice mattered greatly. Baby boomers need only recall Benjamin Braddock’s graduation party, where a friend of the family urged upon him this unsolicited career advice: “One word … plastics.” (Non-boomers may need to be told that we’re talking about Mike Nichols’ 1967 movie, The Graduate.) Plastics may not be the vertical of promise it once was, but there are still advantages in choosing a strong vertical market. The global economy, forecast to grow in the aggregate 3.5%, (World Economic Outlook) does not grow evenly. Some regions and some industries will grow faster than others. Situating oneself in a high-growth vertical market does not guarantee career success but increases the probability of positive opportunities.

7 Ways AI Will Revolutionize Business Travel

Once you pass through airport security, “you’re back on track timewise and decide to get a coffee and something to read,” Thompson continues. “While approaching the book store, you’re notified of special promotions based on your reading history. Then, at checkout you receive a coupon for gardening and classic car magazines, based on a recommendation system that knows these are your hobbies. “Now you’re starting to wonder why your co-worker hasn’t arrived at the gate. She receives a warning that she was in the wrong terminal and gets instructions on the quickest route to the correct gate. Location services have long been used to route planes. Now, they can also be leveraged to better move passengers along and help assure that flights are on time.”

Compliance Risks And The Fast-Growing Company

By implementing continuous accounting, which embeds the period-end tasks within accountants’ day-to-day activities, companies can mitigate their accounting and control risks. Costs are lower, since there is less need to employ additional accountants or other temporary help at closing time, while automated tools free up the accountants to provide value-added insights and services. That’s great news for fast-growing companies confronting the hodgepodge of accounting regulations and reporting standards worldwide. Rather than be the naysayer when operations come calling for capital to grow the business, the CFO is a strategic partner in the market expansion. With visibility into the flow of capital, the CFO can confidently say, “Yes, you can” do this or that as the engine of growth accelerates.

Not investing in cybersecurity has 'inverse ROI'

Clearly, there's an argument about the inverse ROI of not doing cybersecurity. It became very, very clear [that] the attack and the attack patterns were at older machines and institutions that had not patched something that was available for several months. So you can review your entire cybersecurity policy, and it may go to that level. But really this was about keeping your software licensed and current and patching things. For companies that do it right, they didn't have disruption; they didn't have to consider paying a ransom. For companies that don't do it right, they just learn what it costs to not do it right. The real lesson to be learned is that there is very much the potential for the big one. And the question is, how do organizations prepare and understand that with regard to ROI, and then how do we deal with it as a society?

Cybersecurity labor crunch to hit 3.5 million unfilled jobs by 2021

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) recently estimated that India alone will need 1 million cybersecurity professionals by 2020 to meet the demands of its rapidly growing economy. Demand for security professionals in India will increase in all sectors due to the unprecedented rise in the number of cyber attacks, according to NASSCOM. Despite having the largest information technology talent pool in the world, India is highly unlikely to produce an adequate number of professionals to close the cybersecurity skills gap. "Every IT position is also a cybersecurity position now" according to the Cybersecurity Jobs Report, 2017. "Every IT worker, every technology worker, needs to be involved with protecting and defending apps, data, devices, infrastructure, and people."

Tracking Hacking: The World’s Biggest Data Breaches

Each bubble represents the number of records lost in any given breach, with the most sensitive data clustered toward the right side. Before 2009, the majority of data breaches were the fault of human errors like misplaced hard drives and stolen laptops, or the efforts of “inside men” looking to make a profit by selling data to the highest bidder. Since then, the volume of malicious hacking has exploded relative to other forms of data loss. Increasingly sophisticated hacking has altered the scale of data loss by orders of magnitude. For example, an “inside job” breach at data broker Court Ventures was once one of the world’s largest single losses of records at 200 million. However, it was eclipsed in size shortly thereafter by malicious hacks at Yahoo in 2013 and 2014 that compromised over 1.5 billion records, and now larger hacks are increasingly becoming the norm.

Key Abstractions for IoT-Oriented Software Engineering

Despite the considerable research on the Internet of Things (IoT), the technologies to make the IoT a systematic reality are far from being assessed. Early research focused mostly on communication and interoperability1. More recently, researchers have tried to facilitate the integration of resources and services toward provisioning software-defined distributed services. This is the case, for example, for the Web of Things (WoT) vision2, which aims to employ standard Web technologies to help develop coordinated IoT services. The WoT-possibly integrated with concepts from agent-based computing3,4-will likely represent a keystone technology in the IoT's future. Along such lines, several approaches (for example, in terms of supporting middleware5,6 and programming7) exist to aid IoT system and application development.

Machine learning systems are a 'land rush' of opportunity for CIOs

"There are so many opportunities that people haven't cashed in on yet," Brynjolfsson said. "And the bottleneck now is actually identifying the problems and opportunities that these technologies can be applied to most effectively." Experimentation -- such as Google turning a gaming algorithm loose on its data center to reduce power consumption -- is key. "The main error that a lot of companies are going to make is to extrapolate from the past and keep doing what they were doing with a little bit better accuracy or a little bit better precision," McAfee said. ... One thing is certain, the authors added: Machines aren't good at everything. Tasks that require creative thinking, interpersonal connections, large-scale problem solving or complex planning are still better performed by humans -- at least for now.

Quote for the day:

"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes." -- Paulo Coelho

Daily Tech Digest - June 06, 2017

Vulnerabilities Could Unlock Brand-New Subarus

There's irony in Guzman's latest findings. Last year, he had a 2016 Subaru. It lacked the telematics unit, but Subaru had a mobile app that owners could use to track vehicle maintenance. It also used a token that didn't expire, which Guzman says he reported and Subaru fixed. But the same vulnerability appeared again this year. Subaru "must have re-merged the code and reintroduced the vulnerabilities," he says. So how would an attack work? There are preconditions: An attacker would have to know, for example, that the victim has a 2017 Subaru - or later - with Starlink installed. The key to Guzman's attack is capturing the token that gets generated, and there are a variety of ways to do this. One way is by exploiting a cross-site scripting - aka XSS - vulnerability that Guzman also found.

Reverse Mentoring A Unique Approach To Rejuvenating Your IT Culture

CIOs are searching for employees skilled in the latest mobile, cloud, social and analytics tools, who can build, ship and maintain software using agile and devops methodologies. But such skillsets are in short supply at traditional enterprises whose IT workforces are long in legacy systems and short on digital capabilities. Enter digitally-savvy millennials as mentors. This younger generation, now entering the workforce, is a great resource for educating more tenured staff members on the use of new technologies, Gartner analysts Lily Mok and Diane Berry wrote in a research note earlier this year. “In return, younger staff can gain from senior staff knowledge and capabilities, such as business acumen, proper business protocol and more mature decision-making skills that come with time and experience,” the analysts wrote.

Artificial Intelligence Is About Machine Reasoning

With machine learning you will never be able to adapt to change, which is what every company is looking for. Because change equals innovation! Thus, we consider machine learning as a mathematic optimization technique, which is fully optional. Talking about a decision-making process, everything works correctly without machine learning. Thus, the machine will find a solution on its own. Machine learning can be used to make the way to the solution shorter or more efficient by applying or selecting better knowledge. That's what machine learning is used for. In our case, machine learning classifies the atomic knowledge pieces in the situation of a certain problem and prioritizes and chooses the better suited pieces to provide the best solution. Thus, machine learning helps to select the best knowledge to a specific state of a problem.

IBM Research creates a groundbreaking 5-nanometer chip

It’s a remarkable technical achievement, though a commercial version of the chip may not be possible for a while. Still, it should enable chips with 30 billion transistors, the on-off switches of electronic devices, on a fingernail-sized chip. Researchers say this kind of achievement should enable the $330 billion chip industry to stay on the path of Moore’s Law, or the prediction made in 1965 by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would double every couple of years. IBM is presenting details of its research on its “silicon nanosheet transistors” at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. The development comes less than two years after IBM researchers made a 7-nanometer test node chip with 20 billion transistors.

Healthcare CIO advocates a faster move to the cloud

CIOs have a somewhat adversarial relationship with vendors even though we need them. A lot of CIOs lose sight of that and develop a real animosity toward vendors, which I get because we're bombarded by hundreds of vendors by email and phone calls. But it simplifies the CIO's job to have a small set of partners to manage rather than a wide variety of vendors. A partnership with a select few helps you drive your organization forward, because they become thought leaders, people you can turn to whenever you have big projects. Some CIOs ask: 'How do you know you're getting the best price?' You can test it as you go along and keep the vendors from getting too comfortable with their position. But most vendors understand the importance of the partnership. And with my partners, I can call the CEO and get some action. That's comforting to know.

Lack of Experience May Plague IoT Security Startups

“What’s going on right now is enterprises are extending the existing security infrastructure or security components they have already invested in to address early IoT issues,” said IDC analyst Robert Westervelt who co-authored a new forecast that said the worldwide market for IoT security product will grow from $11.2 billion in 2017 to $21.2 billion by 2021. “Some of the issues, depending on the industry and use case, are surely embedded system security. And so that’s why we think those two segments — device and sensor, and network and edge — are going to have the most growth over the next five years.” IoT security risks vary by industry. Healthcare organizations, for example, are using IoT patient monitoring tools that rely on sensors, which collect patient health data, and then transfer this data to the cloud so a physician can analyze it.

The 7 hottest jobs in IT

“With the intense focus on predictive analytics, deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, these positions should remain relevant for years to come,” says Flavio Villanustre, vice president of infrastructure and security for LexisNexis Risk Solutions. ... “To the best of our knowledge, it’s not clear how we can build machine learning models where only limited amount of data is available,” says Mehdi Samadi, CTO of Solvvy. “This is currently limiting the types of intelligent applications that we expect to see in the near future. The solution to this problem is either to find approaches that help us to generate data, or building more robust machine learning models which can learn from limited data. Transfer learning algorithms, learning from the data available in other domains in order to perform well in a new domain,” is a promising area for engineers, says Samadi.

Jindal Power And Steel Is Becoming Steel Smart With IoT

What Jindal Steel and Power has done at its Angul plant is enable an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) setup by creating a network of machines, advanced analytics, supply chain and people. The World Economic Forum, in its 2015 report, called IIoT— the latest wave of technological change that will bring unprecedented opportunities, along with new risks, to business and society. “The IoT framework helps the steel plant work smart,” says Anand. The framework helps the plant workers at the Jindal Steel and Power Plant in Angul to monitor the health and status of the machines. It also provides the interoperability of mobile devices with control systems to ease real time remote management. “The IoT allows the real time process monitoring and control on local network and creates an interface to the mobile devices and analytics layer,” says Anand.

It's About Time: Where Attackers Have the Upper Hand

Researchers found a broad range of incident response time among businesses. In half of the successful data breaches, it took five to six weeks or less for defenders to detect malicious activity. In the other half, detection took as long as four years. "Half of [breaches] are dealt with in the first 38 days, which is actually pretty good," says Barbara Kay, senior director of product and solutions marketing at McAfee. "It could be better, but it's not too bad." However, she continues, the four-year window in this data indicates there's a lot of activity in infrastructure that goes undetected for a long time. This is a sign of threat actors hidden deep within the business, which will take "deep hunting" to root out. The longest timeframe will typically be with the most sophisticated type of attacker, Kay adds. Someone who is deep within the network for a long time either wants something or has a vendetta against the company.

How Computer Security Pros Hack The Hackers

The secret to hacking is there is no secret. Hacking is like any other trade, like a plumber or electrician, once you learn a few tools and techniques, the rest is just practice and perseverance. Most hackers find missing software patches, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, or social engineer the victim. If it works once, it works a thousand times. It’s so easy and works so regularly that most professional penetration testers quit after a few years because they no longer find it challenging. In my 30 years of professional penetration testing, I’ve hacked into every single company I’ve been hired to legally break into in three hours or less. That includes every bank, government agency, hospital and type of business. I barely got out of high school, and I flunked out of an easy college with a 0.62 grade average. Let’s just say I’m no Rhodes scholar.

Quote for the day:

"Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option." -- Maya Angelou

Daily Tech Digest - June 05, 2017

Artificial intelligence will outperform humans in all tasks in just 45 years

A recent report suggests that those who are paid less than $20 an hour will be unemployed and see their jobs filled by robots over the next few years. But for workers who earn more than $20 an hour there is only a 31 percent chance and those paid double have just a 4 percent risk. To reach these numbers the CEA's 2016 economic report referred to a 2013 study about the 'automation of jobs performed by Oxford researchers that assigned a risk of automation to 702 different occupations'. Those jobs were then matched to a wage that determines the worker's risk of having their jobs taken over by a robot. 'The median probability of automation was then calculated for three ranges of hourly wage: less than 20 dollars; 20 to 40 dollars; and more than 40 dollars,' reads the report. The risk of having your job taken over by a robot, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman told reporters that it 'varies enormously based on what your salary is.'

Deep Learning 101: Demystifying Tensors

Tensorflow and systems like it are all about taking programs that describe a machine learning architecture (such as a deep neural network) and adjusting the parameters of that architecture to minimize some sort of error value. They do this by not only creating a data structure representing our program, but they also produce a data structure that represents the gradient of the error value with respect to all of the parameters of our model. Having such a gradient function makes the optimization go much more easily. But here is the kicker. You can write programs using TensorFlow or Caffe or any of the other systems that work basically the same way. But the programs that you write don’t have to optimize machine learning functions. You can write programs that optimize all kinds of programs if the ones you write use the tensor notation provided by the package that you have chosen.

Get ready for the ‘first robotic empathy crisis

Perhaps the most important thing humans can do to keep AI in check, according to Brin, is to apply accountability measures and regulation. “The only way that you have been able to make it so that our previous AIs — corporations, governments, and such — don’t become cheaters the way the kings and lords and priests were in the past is by breaking up power and setting it against each other in regulated competition, and that is the method by which we have division of powers, that’s the way we have healthy markets,” Brin said. Regulated competition and accountability have been vital to the protection and advancement of what Brin called the “five great arenas” over powerful interests: democracy, science, sports, law and courts, and markets. Beyond his work as a consultant to federal agencies and his writing, Brin is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Imagination at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Serverless computing takes another step forward

Like most other serverless environments Functions uses webhooks as triggers. You're able to define the type of webhook used, and Functions' code editor will help you extract payloads that can then be delivered to the Twilio APIs. It's a relatively simple environment at present, offering node.js functionality for your code. That makes sense, as node.js works best when treated as a switch in a message-driven environment. Messages for Functions come in on webhooks and once processed, the output is delivered through Twilio's messaging APIs. Malatack sees the serverless model as a style of programming, where you need to think as little as possible about anything other than your code. "It's a progression for developers as things are abstracted. That's important as abstractions are better, they make it easier to focus on the outcome." It should result in developers getting more leverage, as there's no need to think about complex issues like scaling.

Five Ways To Cultivate a Data-driven Culture for Your Business

In today’s dynamic marketplace, the ability for businesses to use data to identify challenges, spot opportunities, and adapt to change with agility is critical to its survival and long-term success. Therefore, it has become an absolute necessity for businesses to establish an objective, data-driven culture that empowers employees with the capabilities and skills they need to analyse data and use the insights extracted from it to facilitate a faster, more accurate decision-making process. Contrary to what many people think, cultivating a data-driven culture is not just a one-time transformation. Instead, it’s more like a journey that requires efforts from employees and direction from both managers and executives. In this article, I am sharing five different ways businesses can accelerate their transformation into a data-driven enterprise.

How to find the real value in operational big data

You must first understand how to conceptually rationalize all your sites. What is the strategic importance of all the sites in your business operations, and how will you measure performance in aggregate? How do business operations contribute to the overall health of the company, and how will you communicate that through key performance indicators? This exercise should result in a scorecard that aligns with your technical efforts. Metadata analysis is your next step. The strategic team and the technical team must work together to map data from the scorecard all the way down to the sites. Generalization, filtration, and transformation are three key activities this team must perform. Generalization involves mapping up similar data points in to one common concept; filtration is the purposeful exclusion and inclusion of data; and transformation is the rule set that moves included data to common concepts.

The digital revolution: The future is … disruptive banking

A full-serviced digital bank is now a more attractive option, especially because by definition these types of banks are more flexible and instantly responsive, focused on removing the bottlenecks in the existing experience, delivering increased convenience and a more humanised experience with the customer’s interest at its core. These start-up digital banks are likely to not only add competition into the marketplace but to disrupt the entire sector, forcing change with their greater focus on customer experience and satisfaction. Digital banks are more agile than established institutions and create a better user experience and more value for the customer. This value is not fiscal, but delivered through a more personalised experience for each customer.

Is technology destroying the quality of human interaction?

Looking at the world around us today, many things which were not here 10 years ago are fully ingrained in our daily lives. A day without Google, FaceTime or WhatsApp would be quite an experience for me. I use WhatsApp to stay in touch with my family and thanks to FaceTime my kids can see their dad every day even if I am on the other side of the planet. Although I have never met any of the makers of the software, I trust these brands because their products work seamlessly. So instead of trusting the people behind the brand, I have built trust in the brand because their product continuously satisfies my expectations. Obviously, banking is richer than a simple messaging service. Our spectrum ranges from a basic transaction to a complex corporate financing deal. The latter cannot be acknowledged by just ‘two blue ticks’ as is the case for a WhatsApp message.

Continuous Delivery with Kubernetes the Hard Way

Why is continuous delivery so important? Deploying releases to an application continuously eliminates a “release day” mindset. The theory here is that the more frequently releases are done, the less risky releases are. Developers can also make changes to the application (whether implementing new code or rolling back to an older version) as code is ready. This means that the business can make changes more quickly, and therefore be more competitive. Since microservices use APIs to speak to one another, a certain level of backwards compatibility needs to be guaranteed between releases to avoid having to synchronize releases between teams. According to Conway’s law, software takes on the structure of the organization it belongs to. Thus, microservices and containers are just as much about organizational changes as they are about technological changes.

Benchmarks Don't Have to Die

Benchmarks are not just useful for improvements. They can be used as the basis for regression testing, ensuring that performance stays consistent as code is changed. Given that performance isn’t a binary state like broken/working, it’s not always obvious when a regression has occurred. Methodically tracking performance regressions is extremely important for mature projects. Perhaps most important of all, publishing a well-crafted benchmark can codify an entire community’s understanding of interesting workloads and user behaviour. Since the best optimisations figure out the common case and tune for that, benchmarks can guide all developers (especially new ones) towards improving the code that matters most. However, as the Google Chromium team pointed out, there are several drawbacks to benchmarks.

Quote for the day:

"What I've really learned over time is that optimism is a very, very important part of leadership." -- Bob Iger

Daily Tech Digest - June 01, 2017

What is Digital Transformation?

To make this Digital Transformation definition clear and actionable, we also need to define “digital capabilities,” which we’ll define as: Digital capabilities are: electronic, scientific, data-driven, quantified, instrumented, measured, mathematic, calculated and/or automated. While it’s very useful to have a definition, how about we highlight the value of digital transformation by illustrating the difference between a traditional organization and one that has been digitally transformed? So let’s consider a hypothetical case study comparing two companies in the Grocery industry – a traditional Grocer and a “Digitally Transformed” Grocer – to see what the differences might look like.

What Went Wrong In British Airways Data Center in May 2017?

Combining all the different sources shown later in this post, a fairly accurate reconstruction of what went wrong can be provided. The issue BA suffered is very similar to the total failure Delta Airlines experienced in August 2016. ... Most likely BA is using Rotary diesel UPS systems (aka Dynamic UPS) . Contrary to static UPS which uses batteries, a dynamic UPS uses kinetic to store energy. This is guessing but Dutch Hitec (Former Holec) could be the supplier. In normal operation, power is feed thorugh the green line. For maintenance and redundancy, the auto by-pass can be used. This black circuit feeds IT equipment directly from utility power. What likely happened is a failure in a component of the green line. The flywheel can typically supply only 8 to 10 seconds of backup. It is unknown if the UPS had batteries for temporary power.

Taming the Open Source Beast With an Effective Application Security Testing Program

Forrester specifically recommended the following: “Insert a software composition analysis (SCA) tool as early in the SDLC as possible and continue to scan applications, including older applications with inconsistent or long release cycles, to ferret out newly discovered vulnerabilities.” The best way to do this is to integrate open source discovery directly into the application security testing that you are already doing — making it an essential part of your DevOps strategy. IBM has made this process easy and transparent. With introduction of IBM Application Security Open Source Analyzer, part of IBM Application Security on Cloud, identifying open source components occurs automatically during static application security testing (SAST). These components are matched against a list of known vulnerabilities and results are returned.

SMB Security: Don’t Leave the Smaller Companies Behind

Most organizations prioritize risk, identify gaps, and then proceed to identify the people, process, and technology required to mitigate that risk and fill those gaps. This approach is most certainly a sound and methodical one, but it is one that demands a large amount of resources. For a security organization with 50, 100, or 200 staff members and an annual budget in the 10s of millions of dollars, this approach to risk mitigation is an obvious choice. But what are smaller organizations to do? For example, consider the typical mid-market organization. Their security team might consist of one, two, or perhaps five staff members. Their security budget may be a few million dollars, depending on their size, industry sector, and geographical location. Unfortunately, these organizations often find themselves left behind by the security community and without access to trusted circles that could help them make progress.

Securing Your Enterprise’s Expansion into the Cloud

In addition to scalability and segmentation, your underlying security infrastructure should offer automatic awareness of dynamic changes in the cloud environment to provide seamless protection. It’s not enough to detect bad traffic or block malware using discrete security devices. Security should be integrated into security information and event management (SIEM) and other analytics in private and public clouds, providing the ability to orchestrate changes to security policy/posture automatically in response to incidents and events. Individual elements need to work together as an integrated security system with true visibility and control. With these very complex, diverse environments, it becomes increasingly difficult for a human to make decisions intelligently, taking all the variables into consideration, and quickly enough to keep up with threats. Automating security is the goal.

‘Lone Wolf’ Criminal Hacker Gets Doxed Thanks To Series Of Dumb Mistakes

There's probably a lot of hackers just like him out there, but Symantec decided to expose him because it was a strange case. Igor is good enough to use custom-made malware, but also careless enough to make almost no effort to protect his real identity, DiMaggio argued. To hide his tracks in his more recent attacks, Igor has used covert channels such as randomly generated domains to communicate with his malware. But in 2013, when he uploaded an early version of the same malware to Virus Total, an online repository where anyone can upload files to check whether they are detected by antivirus companies, he used a regular domain, according to Symantec. That was one of his key mistakes. The other one was that throughout his years-long hacking career, Igor has used his real name—or at least a consistent persona or alias—to register domains

IBM’s Watson is really good at creating cancer treatment plans

Watson for Oncology is a cognitive computing system trained by physicians at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It's able to take a patient's medical records, extract pertinent information about their health, and come up with a personalized treatment plan. Watson can also suggest which treatments should not be pursued and provides relevant studies to back up its proposals. All in all, it's meant to help clinicians navigate each patient's case with the help of the latest available research. Watson's healthcare successes aren't new, but these additional findings make it that much more useful for doctors. Further, while Watson is already being used all around the world, it's adding nine new hospitals to its client list, including medical groups in Australia, Mexico, Brazil and throughout southeast Asia. However, financial and functional issues have postponed a planned launch at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center.

A New Internal Threat to Your Environment? ‘Checkbox Security’

A checkbox security approach breaks down in this scenario – there are simply too many variables outside the scope of compliance-focused toolsets to ensure the security of your environment. A checkbox security approach that relies on your compliance policies is, simply put, vulnerable. Being compliant does not mean your environment is secure; and conversely, just because your environment is secure does not mean it’s compliant. Governance automation can go a long way in satisfying compliance requirements while also enforcing security policies to protect against internal and external threats. In a virtual or cloud-based (public, private or hybrid) environment with constantly shifting and distributed resources and possibly shared services, automated governance tooling is indispensable for implementing a comprehensive risk strategy at scale, no matter the size of your organization.

CIOs Key To Bridging The IT/OT Devide

"The intersection of IT and OT changes the relative importance of IT management disciplines for the IT organizations concerned. CIOs and other IT leaders need to evaluate and realign their roles and relationships to maximize the value of converging IT and OT," Gartner's Kristian Streenstrup, research vice president and Gartner fellow, said at the time. "CIOs have a great opportunity to lead their enterprises in exploiting information flows from digital technologies. By playing this role, they can better enable decisions that optimize business processes and performance." That still holds true six years later, Jouret believes, though the struggle to realize that opportunity remains. Jouret’s perspective is unique. He spent the early part of his career as Cisco's IT director for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), with a turn as CTO of Emerging Technologies at Cisco and CTO for Nokia before landing his current role as CDO at ABB Group about nine months ago.

Cyber security employee shortage barrier to effective threat detection

“Tools and training cannot be a one-time investment, and conversely, require constant attention to keep cybersecurity threat detection tools up to date, patched, and working in an integrated fashion—on top of constantly retooling and training to keep pace with the increasing frequency, sophistication, and diversity of global threats. Your security operations strategy must be underpinned by teams that are equipped with the latest tools, threat intelligence, security content, training, time, and budget to stay ahead of new security threats.” he added. A security operations centre (SOC) consists of a highly skilled team, that continuously monitors and improves an organisation’s security posture whilst preventing, detecting, analysing and responding to cyber security incidents. 81% of respondents agree that the most valuable SOC capabilities are rapid identification and remediation of attacks, while 74% feel that 24×7 threat intelligence monitoring and analysis was an extremely important capability.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders must always question the status quo, be aware of the ever-changing environment and be willing to act decisively." -- Mike Finley

Daily Tech Digest - May 31, 2017

Cisco and IBM announce historic cybersecurity partnership

While the relationship brings technology collaboration and integration to Cisco and IBM customers, it also brings two armies of cyber experts. The tech giants are two of the top 10 cybersecurity startup acquirers. With 40 security acquisitions under their collective belts, Cisco and IBM have snapped up some of the top information security talent along the way. IBM Security alone employs more than 8,000 people globally. One of the core issues impacting security teams is the proliferation of security tools that do not communicate or integrate, according to the press release that announced the new partnership. A recent Cisco survey of 3,000 chief security officers found that 65 percent of their organizations use between six and 50 different security products. Managing such complexity challenges over-stretched security teams and can lead to potential gaps in security.

Florida is Now Courting Hyperscale Data Centers

Data centers developed in rural areas burdened with agricultural tax exemptions can help grow a commercial real estate tax base to boost local budgets. These data centers do not require significant investments in local schools, roads, and parks in return for the entitlement to develop. They also have state-of-the-art security and fire suppression systems which help limit the impact on fire and police resources. The Florida legislature and governor have now taken a crucial step to make the Sunshine State more competitive. However, it isn’t a silver bullet. Notably, the Florida legislature removed economic incentives from Enterprise Florida, which only received $16 million in funding in this latest budget. Florida still has challenges to overcome in attracting massive data centers that could benefit from the new legislation, including: frequent lightning storms, hurricanes, and a harsh climate which requires robust HVAC systems to deal with sensible (heat) and latent (humidity) loads.

Hackers upgrading malware to 64-bit code to evade detection

“The high prevalence of these worms in the threat landscape is unsurprising, as all of them infect files which in turn infect more files, and cause this type of malware to spread quickly and widely,” said the report. “To combat this threat, cyber-security teams must gain a deep understanding of 64-bit systems, and the different mechanisms attackers can leverage to attack them,” said Propper. Bogdan Botezatu, senior e-threat analyst at Bitdefender, told SC Media UK that for specific attacks, 64-bit malware is required to be compatible with the operating system version targeted. These extremely niched families of malware include rootkit drivers (which must be compiled specifically for the target platform), process injectors (including some banker Trojans) and some file infectors (viruses) even if viruses are close to going extinct these days.

OS Instrumentation Framework: osquery

osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL-based queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes. SQL tables are implemented via a simple plugin and extensions API.. ... Management can be simple and flexible. The osquery daemon uses a configuration input plugin and logging output plugin. By default both use a filesystem path. Read using osqueryd for an overview of configuration. osquery can be controllable in real time through community-supported management services. These complimentary services and open source projects are documented in our configuration guide. And writing your own configuration input and results output is supported and encouraged.

eBook: Enterprise Architecture in Practice

The author gives a good account of enterprise architecture in practice but makes some other points and raises some fundamental issues related to the practice of enterprise architecture as it exists today:

Enterprise Architecture is a strategic skill that transcends companies, and industries i.e. the fundamental principles apply across the board; and Enterprise Architecture is much more than a tool for "business IT alignment" or being only about IT - it concerns the entire enterprise and its restriction to IT has limited its value. Toward that end, the ebook discusses: How to setup the enterprise architecture practice or capability in the enterprise; What "work" or "activity" does an enterprise architecture practice/department do and what business benefit does that produce?

Why mobile apps management trumps a traditional BYOD strategy

"We've started to see civil cases take shape," Silva said. "New York State is an example that comes to mind. Someone was a contractor; they signed away their rights on the dotted line. They ended their contract and left. The device got wiped and the last photos of a dead relative were destroyed. It found its way into a court room. That's had a chilling effect on this." In addition, in countries such as France and Germany, there are greater protections for an employee's personal electronic devices that make it even harder to implement tough BYOD policies, Silva added. "We've gotten a lot of questions from enterprises about how can they can manage this without locking down the whole device," Silva said. The majority of smartphones used in the workplace now are personally owned devices.

Why Microsoft's ARM-based Windows 10 laptops still have a lot to prove

The new machines will compete alongside Intel-based models in a sector Microsoft calls "always connected" PCs. These are Windows 10 machines intended to bring some of the best features of smartphones to laptops: an all-day battery life and fast, constant LTE cellular connection. "It's all around this idea that a PC should be connected, just like a smartphone," said McGuire. On current Windows 10 PCs, standby mode means the machine is shutdown but Qualcomm promises greater things from standby on the new computers. "With these systems, you're truly connected and you will be syncing data, Cortana will be available and it give you truly instant on," he said. During a demonstration at Computex in Taipei on Wednesday, Qualcomm showed off a Windows 10 ARM development system running on the Snapdragon 835.

Four Vectors Changing The Security Software Landscape: Gartner

The security software market is currently experiencing rapid transformation mainly because of four key developments, according to Gartner. The use of advanced analytics, expanded ecosystems, adoption of software as a service (SaaS) and managed services, and the prospect of punitive regulations are causing enterprises to rethink their security and risk management software requirements and investments. "The overall security market is undergoing a period of disruption due to the rapid transition to cloud-based digital business and technology models that are changing how risk and security functions deliver value in an organization," said Deborah Kish, principal research analyst at Gartner. "At the same time, the threat landscape and rise in the number of high-impact security incidents are also creating demand for security technologies and innovations that deliver greater effectiveness."

Why employees hate virtual collaboration and what to do about it

Despite the constant influx of new tools, most workplace communication still occurs through face-to-face conversations, phone calls, and email. Admittedly, some newer options have gained traction. For example, 61% of survey respondents reported using work instant messaging daily, and 53% said they participate in virtual meetings more than once a week. However, these media simply replicate the private, one-on-one and small-group conversations enabled by previous technologies while doing little to bring new voices into mix, increase traceability, and facilitate knowledge reuse. To improve the efficiency and quality of workplace collaboration, employees need to transition at least some of the interactions taking place privately in meetings, phone calls, and email to open forums such as communities of practice, enterprise social networks, and collaboration spaces.

Hackers Hide Cyberattacks in Social Media Posts

“Most people don’t think twice when they are posting on social media. They don’t think about people using the information against them maliciously,” Mr. Kaplan said. “They also don’t assume people on their network might be attackers.” According to a 2016 report by Verizon, roughly 30 percent of spear phishing emails are opened by their targets. But research published by the cybersecurity firm ZeroFOX showed that 66 percent of spear phishing messages sent through social media sites were opened by their intended victims. In the Defense Department attack, for example, 7,000 employees took the first step toward being compromised by clicking on a link, said Evan Blair, a co-founder of ZeroFOX. “The attacks are so much more successful because they use your personal timeline and the content you engaged with to target the message to you,” Mr. Blair said.

Quote for the day:

"You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle." -- Shannon L. Alder