Daily Tech Digest

Daily Tech Digest - September 05, 2017

5 Technologies That Are Changing The Future of Driving

The promise is clear. No emissions, no smell, no noise (unless you want it), and potentially far lower overall environmental impact in a machine that can provide you with the same driving power as the “traditional” gas guzzlers. What do the naysayers have to complain about? Well, the mileage for one thing. On long travels your mileage on a single charge between charging stations is still questionable, even when you account for their superb ability to actually charge back the batteries when driving downhill. And when you do get to a charging stations, it may take up to an hour rather than a few minutes to be fully tanked with power and ready to go. ... In Tesla’s case they are known as superchargers and are completely solar powered, free to all Tesla owners, and feeding excess power back to the grid.

Intent-based networking needed to run more complex networks

The closest most vendors come to IBN today are systems that create and distribute policies that tell switches, firewalls and load balancers in the data center how to handle specific types of network traffic. Just building and distributing policies isn’t enough, however. What's lacking in these products are the analytics that provide network engineers with complete information on the state of every device and also help them formulate a policy that accomplishes what they want. Too often, engineers find out after deployment that policies fall short, typically through network monitoring applications. "You're not going to have in intent-based networking [today] everything that you want," said Peyton Maynard-Koran, an engineering director at video game publisher Electronic Arts.

Big data and digital transformation: How one enables the other

Structured data is all of the stuff that fits in traditional spreadsheets and databases--your P&L, your customer list, information about your products and business processes, etc. Unstructured data is all of the new stuff that's often too big to fit into a database--the raw Twitter firehose, Google Trends data, public APIs from governments, and feeds from Internet of Things sensors. When you layer unstructured data on top of structured data, that's where the magic happens. ... But the data team started doing sentiment analysis on Twitter and looking at what people were saying about its products and brands. It also looked at Google Trends to see which products and brands people were searching for the most. Then it correlated that data with its actual sales to see if it was predictive, and it found that it absolutely was.

How do you secure the cloud? New data points a way

Whether it’s a public, private or hybrid cloud environment, web application threats are dominant. What’s different among them is the level of risk you face. “As defenders, at Alert Logic our ability to effectively protect public cloud is higher as well, because we see a better signal-to-noise ratio and chase fewer noisy attacks,” says Misha Govshteyn, co-founder of Alert Logic. “When we see security incidents in public cloud environments, we know we have to pay attention, because they are generally quieter.” The data shows that some platforms are more vulnerable than others. “This increases your attack surface despite your best efforts,” says Govshteyn. As an example he notes that “despite popular belief,” the LAMP stack has been much more vulnerable than the Microsoft-based application stack. He also sees PHP applications as a hotspot.

Blockchain's 4 Biggest Assumptions

The spectrum ranges from those suffering from incumbent biases to those sitting in the trough of disillusionment to others who have spent real time understanding the recent developments but came out negative because of their experiences or beliefs. There are also fervent disagreements between the different blockchain communities that raise key questions. The issues I've been looking for in the midst of all of this are not technical in nature because, in my opinion, those challenges will be solved over time, especially given the massive amount of talent this space has been able to attract and will continue to attract. I have also not focused on external factors such as regulatory risk, though they are huge concerns. I believe that signals shown so far suggest regulators are very savvy and are careful to enact new regulation.

6 things IT executives must do to accelerate IoT adoption

IoT by itself is not innovation, although it may be built with innovative technologies. It’s the problems that it solves and the way it does it that creates innovation. Sustainable innovation doesn’t come from a flash of inspiration. It comes from the hard work of understanding the real underlying problems, hypothesizing possible solutions, building experiments, testing, validating and repeating. Organizations that can do this well become innovative market leaders. The IT organization facilitates IoT innovation by building a “sandbox” for experimentation and proof of concept development. This sandbox comprises of an IoT platform, connected to a non-production IT environment and data. It has tools to create simple software applications, run simulations, analyze data, and collect user feedback. It is designed for easy setup, configuration and connection to a variety of edge devices.

3 Easy Solutions to Optimize Images on the Fly

When pages are slow to load, images are frequently the culprit. According to several studies, the megabyte size of web pages is steadily growing, and images are by far the largest component. It is clear that by optimizing images, most websites will achieve a dramatic performance boost. ... Most photos contain metadata stored by cameras and graphic applications, which is unnecessary for the end user and inflates image size. All the image optimization services we cover in the article strip this metadata along the way. The steps above are time consuming, and require expertise to achieve a perfect result. For a website with only a few images, it might be possible to optimize the images by hand. However, on modern websites with as many as dozens or hundreds of images on one page, automation is needed.

The Future of HR AI-augmented Recruitment and Onboarding

So far, the idea of Artificial Intelligence software replacing HR is a pipe dream. Evaluating and directing people requires a level of intuition that is still far away from technology’s grasp. Neither is it is as free from human bias as vendors want you to believe. AI still bases its decisions on currently available data. If bias has skewed that data in the past, then AI will be working from poisoned assumptions. Do you want to make the workplace more fair and egalitarian? Maybe you (rightly!) think that it makes business sense for your company to have intellectual diversity? The best path is still through changing people’s’ perceptions and attitudes. Handing free reign over to the robot overlords won’t solve it for us.

The role of digital marketing in a millennial's world

To stay relevant, brands have had to adjust and redefine their approach to marketing and must now focus on what it takes to sell to a millennial. With the purchasing platform appearing in a wide range of options, it has become imperative that producers now focus on a seamless customer experience at every touchpoint. Producers that have no barriers to purchase are the ones that maintain repeat sales and loyalty among the millennial audience. While this may seem obvious, many brands have not taken the time to truly understand what their consumer now looks like and how best to market products in the new world of millennials. If brands do this, they will undoubtedly gain the loyalty and support they desire with the modern consumers that they need in order to succeed in the future.

A Bright Outlook for Computing On The Edge

One of the most obvious problems that is fixed by moving datacentres towards the edge is that of latency. Looking towards the near future with the likes of artificial intelligence (AI), there will need to be more powerful analytics solutions located at the points of consumption, because network latency can be costly and even fatal to a wide swath of businesses. Imagine the problems that latency could cause if we get to a point where AI is being used to support medical surgery, or if robotics becomes a critical part of vehicle navigation. Real-time action and response in these scenarios is vital. When talking among peers, it is clear that edge computing and networks won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, and that the balance sought will depend on individual use cases and business scenarios.

Quote for the day:

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Daily Tech Digest - September 04, 2017

Should CIOs take employees offline to improve security?

What's today's stressed IT manager to do? Continue to block, patch and hope? That approach is getting harder to justify, given the rate at which new vulnerabilities appear. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are almost certainly existing vulnerabilities that we – excluding certain national security services – don't know about. Does it still make sense for all of an enterprise to be online? The answer boils down to a cost-benefit analysis: What's the benefit of everyone being connected to the outside world?; and What's the potential cost in terms of hacking, loss of commercial secrets and downtime? Until recently the benefit outweighed the cost, but now it's not so clear-cut, because some of the costs are hard to determine.

There is no such thing as a DR test failure

Testing your IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plan can be laborious, tedious and fraught with potential landmines. Case in point, that was my first exposure to DR way back in the ancient times of the early 1990’s. We were a mainframe shop, Big Blue, Amdahl, you know the beasts. Our infrastructure team had been performing annual DR tests for several years. These were the kind of tests where you rented space and equipment in some far-away datacenter for a finite amount of time, something like 36 hours. Within that window, you had fire up the mainframes, tape drives and disks, restore OS, middleware and all the utilities. This year was going to be different, however. This year, they actually wanted to recover an application. At the time, I was the lead contractor assigned to the order management applications.

Neato Robotics Adds More Smarts To Its Vacuum Cleaners

With Version 2.0 of its smartphone app, the company is adding the ability to program them via IFTTT.com (IF This, Then That). The web service can automatically trigger certain online actions depending on events or data gathered from other online sources. That will give owners of a connected Botvac a new way to trigger a cleaning session. Instead of pushing a button on the robot, or in the app, or setting a fixed schedule of days and times to clean, they will be able to use an IFTTT recipe to tell the robot to start cleaning as soon as their smart thermostat detects that the house is empty, for example. IFTTT's online calendar integration could trigger an extra clean the morning after a party or, for those with particularly muddy outdoor interests, the day after their calendar lists a hike in the woods or a moutain bike race, say.

Payment card security standard compliance and cyberattacks

When looking at the PCI controls that companies would be expected to have in place (such as security testing, penetration tests etc), the report found an increased ‘control gap,’ meaning that many of these basics were absent. In 2015, companies failing their interim assessment had an average of 12.4 percent of controls absent; this has increased to 13 percent in 2016. Simonetti continues, “It is no longer the question of ‘if’ data must be protected, but ‘how’ to achieve sustainable data protection. Many organisations still look at PCI DSS controls in isolation and don’t appreciate that they are inter-related – the concept of control lifecycle management is far too often absent. This is often the result of a shortage of skilled in-house professionals – however, in our experience, internal proficiency can be dramatically improved with lifecycle guidance from external experts.”

Five steps to a secure workforce

The first step in securing your employees is to understand what they do, and therefore what they need access to. By governing their privileges, you’ll be limiting their ability to do damage with your data, intentionally or unwittingly, without stopping them from doing their jobs. This begins with understanding who handles what in your organisation, and how. Analyse different employee roles. How many of them are there? Create a list and then assign responsibilities to each role, along with the level of information that they need access to when doing their job. Then, place individual job titles into these roles. This will be the basis for a least-privilege access model that gives employees access to the data they need on a need-to-know basis. After creating a framework for managing access, you must build security policies that use this framework to define employee behaviour and mitigate information security risk.

How to install and enable ModSecurity with NGINX on Ubuntu Server

ModSecurity is toolkit for real time web application monitoring, logging, and access control. This open source Web Application Firewall (WAF) module does an outstanding job of protecting web servers (Apache, NGINX, and IIS) from attacks that target potential vulnerabilities in various web applications. ModSecurity handles tasks like: Real-time application security monitoring and access control; Full HTTP traffic logging; Continuous passive security assessment; and Web application hardening. I want to walk you through the process of installing both ModSecurity and NGINX, so you can ensure your web server is better capable of standing up against certain attacks. The installation process is a bit complicated and handled completely through the command line.

Hacker hijacks police radio broadcast until cops call off car chase of armed robbers

During the car chase, an unknown person posing as a cop came over the police radio multiple times. The unauthorized voice reportedly interrupted so often that the real cops abandoned the chase. According to Triple M, “It's not known exactly what instructions were being given over the illegal broadcasts.” However, Victoria Police spokeswoman Lauren Kells said, “Throughout the incident there were a number of disruptions during the radio transmissions which are being investigated.” The police are now hunting for the person behind the pirate transmissions on emergency services radio; they believe they’ve narrowed down the area of the pirate transmission and asked citizens to come forward if anyone recognizes the radio hijacker’s voice.

Six Ways Agile Can Turn Static

This may be the Holy Grail, but this goal isn’t always possible. Idealistically speaking, agile development has all the right elements but it isn’t suitable for every project. Let’s consider how it works in the best case scenario. Agile development accelerates the delivery of initial business value, and through a process of continuous planning and feedback. As a result of this iterative planning and feedback loop, teams are able to continuously align the delivered software with desired business needs, easily adapting to changing requirements throughout the process. Measuring and evaluating status is based on accurate visibility into the actual progress of projects through all of its stages with all of the project stakeholders. As a result of following an agile process, at the conclusion of a project the software system addresses business and customer needs better.

IT staffs see changing roles amid cloud UC

The shift to cloud significantly affects the organization and strategies of IT staffs. Surprisingly, companies moving to cloud are seeing increases in IT staffs, rather than decreases, according to Nemertes data. For some companies, this trend is temporary, as organizations add staff to manage the cloud transition while still supporting legacy infrastructure. But, for most companies, the additional staff brought on board -- to manage vendor relationships, deployments and training -- is often reassigned to business-facing roles. Organizations moving to the cloud have seen a reduction of full-time equivalents dedicated to operations and technical support. These reductions were more than offset by increases in staff responsible for vendor relationship management, user awareness and adoption efforts, and business-IT liaison roles, leading to a 6% net increase of total staff.

Transforming from Autonomous to Smart: Reinforcement Learning Basics

Reinforcement Learning is for situations where you don’t have data sets with explicit known outcomes, but you do have a way to telling whether you are getting closer to your goal. ... Actions may affect immediate rewards but actions may also affect subsequent or longer-term rewards, so the full extent of rewards must be considered when evaluating the reinforcement learning effectiveness. Reinforcement learning is used to address two general problems: Prediction: How much reward can be expected for every combination of possible future states; and Control: By moving through all possible combinations of the environment, find a combination of actions that maximizes reward and allows for optimal control.

Quote for the day:

"Many people think great entrepreneurs take risks. Great entrepreneurs mitigate risks." -- Jal Tucher

Daily Tech Digest - September 03, 2017

A Web Of Interoperable Blockchain Platforms

When blockchain technology first reared its head, interoperability was not a subject of much debate; there was only one blockchain and it was all about bitcoin. As time passed, more and more disparate blockchain platforms rose, among them Ethereum, and these various platforms innovated in different directions, creating their own protocols. These protocols make it impossible for the chains to send and receive data from one another for reasons similar to that of why a program designed for Windows OS will not function on Mac OS. ... These protocols are designed to both maximize efficiency between disparate blockchain deployments and allow for a co-existence between them to form, creating a more cohesive ecosystem. There are some great examples of innovation to that end.

Your Digital Transformation Won't Succeed Without Cultural Change

Companies from the pre-digital era therefore need to adjust or shift their organizational culture to keep up in today’s digital world. MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte recently released their third annual Digital Business report. The report highlighted five key practices of companies developing into "more mature digital organizations." Each of these five key practices focuses on some aspect of organizational culture, a clear indication of the importance culture plays in a company’s ability to adopt new business methods and practices. The question is why is modifying culture so challenging and what guidance can companies follow to increase the likelihood of a successful cultural change?

Business intelligence data is getting even more user friendly

In the digital era, data is pervasive. For many organizations, the amount of data they collect has become a major problem. Others struggle to identify what data will be most helpful for them to gather. Big data, while revolutionary, has created a glut of information leaving companies trying to figure out how to structure it to generate actionable insights. Business Intelligence is at the core of any kind of long-term business strategy, because it helps make sense of the data. When utilized, data strategy can have a big impact on any operation. When surveyed, 72% of business leaders said that they lacked the tools to effectively manage their data for their existing and future efforts. To meet that need, technology companies are beginning to bring more integrated solutions to market.

3 key advantages for AI in the retail space

We’ve learned how to understand real-time customer queries via NLP and extract value from legacy data using machine learning methodology. The challenge of making use of ongoing customer feedback is bigger, but so are its benefits. This challenge requires joint forces. First, an NLP engine needs to extract sense from a query in natural language. After, machine learning steps in to extract value from this sense. Using classification, intelligent machines assign meaning to data, relying on their background and existing knowledge. In practice, the system classifies certain products, say “books,” by categories, say “popular among women over 65.” For retail, this means more focused recommendation and upselling. Using clustering for new information, in turn, opens totally new horizons.

Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite

In short, when it comes to detecting emotion in other people, the face and body do not speak for themselves. Instead, variation is the norm. Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations. People’s movements in general, however, are tremendously variable. To teach emotional intelligence in a modern fashion, we need to acknowledge this variation and make sure your brain is well-equipped to make sense of it automatically.

Get real on container security: 4 rules DevOps teams should follow

The numbers underscore that paying attention to the packages and components that make up a container image is extremely important, especially if the container is from a public repository. Managing the software supply chain requires that companies regularly test their container images for vulnerabilities and vulnerable dependencies. The first lesson is for developers to use container images from sources that they trust, said Anders Wallgren, chief technology officer at Electric Cloud, a software deployment company. "Use images of well-known provenance. If you are going to use Ubuntu, use the published machine instance." In addition, any container image—whether sourced or homegrown—should be frequently tested for vulnerabilities and unwanted software. Luckily, software testing can be easily automated, and should be.

Open Banking - What Does It Mean For Banks And Fintechs?

Open Banking is a new set of regulations in the UK that were created to give consumers more control over their money. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued new rules that would allow consumers to more easily manage their money, switch accounts to find the best deals for their particular needs, as well as avoid high overdraft charges. These new regulations will go into effect in January 2018. As part of the Open Banking regulations, the CMA set a package of remedies to increase innovation and improve competition in retail banking. This includes a requirement for the nine largest current account providers to make available to authorized third parties – customer consent and secure access to specific current accounts in order to read the transaction data and initiate payments.

Distributed, always-on data management

Data platforms should support applications in context, blending transactional, analytical, search, and graph capabilities. In a financial services context, that might mean taking a credit card transaction, analyzing the customer’s buying patterns and searching for the information to approve the transaction. Data management platforms have to process multiple workloads in a single data platform simultaneously. ... A data platform must provide zero downtime. For example, one DataStax customer kept its recommendation engine running despite a hurricane that took down a whole data center. All of the company’s databases failed except DSE because its architecture was able to retain uptime via data distribution across other data centers.

AI chatbots can provide business value when used wisely

One area where businesses are finding the most value from AI today is in customer service. Chatbot applications are among the most mature areas of AI. But enterprises are finding that, while AI chatbots can provide value, they have to be deployed the right way. For online test preparation company Magoosh Inc., that means giving machines license to recommend responses to simple customer service queries, while still maintaining a team of agents who handle more complicated issues. Magoosh uses a customer service bot from DigitalGenius to handle incoming customer service inquiries. The system scans messages for their content and recommends prewritten responses that can be personalized or sent out as is.

The product design challenges of AR on smartphones

So there’s a very real and difficult problem in getting a user to get their phone out while they are in the best place to use your app. Notifications could come via traditional push messages, or the user might think to use the app by seeing something in the real world that they want more information on, and they already know your app can help with this. Otherwise, your app just needs to work anywhere, either through using unstructured content, or being able to tap into content that is very, very common. This problem is the No. 1 challenge for all the “AR graffiti” type apps that let people drop notes for others to find. It’s almost impossible for users to be aware that there’s content to find. FYI — this is just another version of the same problem that all the “beacon” hardware companies have, getting the shopper to pull out their phone to discover beneficial content.

Quote for the day:

"As long as you are fighting for what is right instead of who is right, you can never lose!" -- @Rory_Vaden

Daily Tech Digest - September 02, 2017

IBM is teaching AI to behave more like the human brain

Statistical AI (ie machine learning) is capable of mimicking the brain's pattern recognition skills but is garbage at applying logic. Symbolic AI, on the other hand, can leverage logic (assuming it's been trained on the rules of that reasoning system), but is generally incapable of applying that skill in real-time. But what if we could combine the best features of the human brain's computational flexibility with AI's massive processing capability? That's exactly what the team from DeepMind recently tried to do. They've constructed a neural network able to apply relational reasoning to its tasks. It works in much the same way as the brain's network of neurons. While neurons use their various connections with each other to recognize patterns, "We are explicitly forcing the network to discover the relationships that exist" between pairs of objects in a given scenario

Bridging the boardroom’s technology gap

Relevant IT know-how can dramatically change board discussions and perspectives. Some boards employ external experts or consultants to meet this need, but outsourcing this function is an approach that can frequently lack accountability, eschew specific business context, disregard the organization’s technology capabilities, or rely on generic recommendations. Boards can address this deficiency through a three-pronged approach: appointing a business-savvy technologist to the board, taking a more offensive technology position, and considering a technology committee. Although current or former CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and other C-level technology leaders could provide valuable input and perspective to boards, Deloitte’s analysis indicates that only 3 percent of all public companies appointed a technologist to newly opened board seats in 2016

Your Future Smart Home Might Need A Bosch X-Spect Scanner

According to Dr. von Bieren, X-Spect smart homes technology is similar to that of the SCiO scanner. Like the SCiO technology, it can only read the ingredients of orange, not a cupcake. So only homogenous food items need apply. According to c|net, the most unique thing about X-Spect scanner is its ability to read the makeup of fabric and stains. Rich Brown of c|net wrote, “Right now the X-Spect can determine up to two component materials in a piece of fabric, and also let you know their relative proportions. We saw a demo on a blended cotton-poly t-shirt, for example. The creators hope to bring X-Spect to the point where it can read three different materials. It’s not there yet, but it can read four different kinds of stains. I saw it read chocolate and lipstick via a prepared demo at the Bosch booth.”

Security chatbot empowers junior analysts, helps fill cybersecurity gap

Endgame’s Alexa integration — which they believe is a first in the security industry —utilizes natural language understanding to let security analysts simply ask their network what’s going on. They can ask anything from a general check-in to specific queries about attack types, and execute commands to keep their system safe. The idea is that junior analysts can sit, ask questions, and take actionable steps without being crippled because of syntax or query language. "We wanted to tackle the problem of learning language," Filar said. "It's a good way to help move up to a senior analyst more quickly." Though, I did wonder how it would be possible to move up to a senior analyst without learning the programming language. "What we try to do," Filar said, "is provide a framework that can grow with the experience of the analyst.

What to expect from the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

This will be the fourth feature update to Windows 10 in a little over two years. And that pace will continue, with new feature updates (essentially full upgrades) due on a predictable twice-yearly cadence going forward. As with previous feature updates, there will be no last-minute surprises in this update. It's been developed in the open, with dozens of preview releases to members of the Windows Insider Program. For those who haven't been paying close attention, though, this article should get you up to speed quickly. When I looked through my notes from the past few months of testing Windows Insider builds, I was struck by how many changes have made their way into this update. And those changes encompass a wide array of user scenarios, including a healthy assortment aimed at IT pros and developers.

The current state of applied data science

Deep learning is slowly becoming part of the class of algorithms data scientists need to know about. Originally used in computer vision and speech recognition, there are starting to be examples and use cases involving data types and problems that data scientists can relate to. Challenges include choosing the right network architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and casting problems and transforming data so they lend themselves to deep learning. In many cases, users prefer and favor models that are explainable. Given that their underlying mechanisms are somewhat understandable, explainable models are also potentially easier to improve. With the recent rise of deep learning, I’m seeing companies use tools that explain how models produce their predictions and tools that can explain where a model comes from by tracing predictions from the learning algorithm

When AI and security automation become foolish and dangerous

Technology provides significant and material financial incentives over its unpredictable and fallible human counterparts. Perhaps most tellingly, automation is a key component of most vendors’ ROI stories, meaning it’s a powerful tool in the “buy our product and we will save you money” toolbox. But should organizations really be sprinting headlong into automation? There is no question that automation delivers significant value to organizations. Repetitive and boring tasks waste valuable time and result in unhappy and unengaged employees. ... Implementing some automated solutions can prove valuable. However, when it comes to network security, fully automating the tasks of a security analyst can be a dangerous and foolish decision for a variety of reasons.

The Foundation for Modernizing Application Architectures

What’s emerging is microservices – replacing monolithic applications with modular applets that are designed to do specific tasks. While the overall functionality may be the same as the monolithic app it replaces, application maintenance overhead is drastically reduced. It also means new technologies can easily be integrated, and emerging technologies like IoT and the Industrial Internet can become part of the ecosystem. The end result? Microservices architectures creates agility. So why isn’t this happening quickly? Business response to demands for new apps, integrations, business models, and emerging technologies is slow and inefficient because existing IT infrastructure, coupled with the legacy (monolithic) application model, are obstacles to the rapid and scalable delivery of digital transformation initiatives including mobile, cloud and IoT.

Fatal AI mistakes could be prevented by having human teachers

Having a human in the loop doesn’t always stop AI going wrong, however. When Evans tried the same approach with the game Road Runner, the AI overseer wasn’t able to block every big mistake the game-playing AI made. More complicated Atari games would require years of human oversight before agents were able to play without making mistakes. Even a system trained with human oversight is never going to be absolutely safe. It’s hard to know how these systems will behave in circumstances that an AI hasn’t been trained to handle, says Evans. And even the best AI could be led astray by a sloppy human trainer. “This is only as good as the human,” says Evans. If we are to trust robots in the home and hospitals, then we will need to have some guarantees about their safety, says David Abel at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

CI tried, but did not eliminate data center specialists

Perry was surprised to see how many organizations more closely evaluate their mix of on-premises and off-premises compute resources and spending. CI works well in environments with small staff sizes. But growing enterprises still need data center specialists, particularly within companies reluctant to move new workloads to the public cloud. ... Enterprises still need data center specialists in virtualization and, out of this rank, will come specialists in container management as enterprises adopt this technology, Perry said. Applications and software specialists are also in demand, particularly in growing areas such as security and DevOps, Perry said. A generalist position merges traditional specialist roles, such as server administrator or virtualization administrator, particularly if they involve management of CI. To successfully oversee CI, they must understand the storage ecosystem, Perry said.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership matters more in times of uncertainty." -- Wayde Goodall

Daily Tech Digest - September 01, 2017

The Four Laws of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is about innovating business models, not just optimizing business processes Organizations are looking to leverage these digital assets to create new “economic moats.” Warren Buffett, the investor extraordinaire, popularized the term “economic moat.” “Economic moat” refers to a business’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over its competitors (through process and technology innovation and patents) in order to protect its long-term profits and market share from competing firms. As highlighted in the McKinsey Quarterly article titled “Competing In A World Of Sectors Without Borders,” organizations are embracing digital transformation to knock down traditional industry boundaries and disrupt conventional business models

How to do open source right: LinkedIn shows the way

If you want to know how to do open source the smart way, pay attention to LinkedIn. It has delivered some of the industry’s most impressive open source software, most recently its Cruise Control load-balancing tool for Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform also developed by LinkedIn that is used to build real-time data pipelines and streaming apps in big data applications. Cruise Control exemplifies the serious open source savvy on LinkedIn’s part, with its extensibility and generality. Although meant for general consumption, Cruise Control didn’t have a real community around it; it had been developed by and for LinkedIn. But LinkedIn built Cruise Control in a way that would translate beyond LinkedIn’s needs. Many such projects make the rookie mistake of solving only their creators’ needs; LinkedIn didn’t make that mistake.

How Does AI And Regulation Play Into Fintech?

“I think the biggest change is that people are going to receive financial help before they even know it,” says WIRED Money 2017 speaker and CEO of online investment management company Nutmeg Nick Hungerford. “It’s a combination of big data and artificial intelligence. We’re going to be able to be more intelligent about people’s spending habits, their health, their lifestyles. [We’re] going to get more effective at predicting what they’re going to need for different scenarios of spending and saving. AI predicts when people are likely to get married, when you are likely to have a baby, etc. So in five years, we should be really good at giving people financial advice before they even realise they need it,” says Hungerford. AI is also being experimented with traditional financial institutions.

Disturbing trends revealed by the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report

As more and more enterprise systems have moved to the cloud, more and more malicious attacks on cloud services have followed. According the Microsoft report, there was a "300 percent increase in Microsoft cloud-based user accounts attacked year-over-year." The attacks on cloud services can be traced to all countries of the world, but in the case of Azure specifically, some 35% originated in China, with another 32% coming from the United States. Ransomware, while garnering many headlines in 2017, actually affects enterprises from various parts of the world much differently. For example, ransomware is a major headache for many European countries, while the activity is almost trivial for the United States, China, and Japan. However, that does not mean those counties are not vulnerable—criminal activity changes just as fast as technology changes.

Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work

AI will eliminate some forms of this digital labour—software, for instance, has got better at transcribing audio. Yet AI will also create demand for other types of digital work. The technology may use a lot of computing power and fancy mathematics, but it also relies on data distilled by humans. For autonomous cars to recognise road signs and pedestrians, algorithms must be trained by feeding them lots of video showing both. That footage needs to be manually “tagged”, meaning that road signs and pedestrians have to be marked as such. This labelling already keeps thousands busy. Once an algorithm is put to work, humans must check whether it does a good job and give feedback to improve it. A service offered by CrowdFlower, a micro-task startup, is an example of what is called “human in the loop”.

Acer's Switch 7 could overpower the Surface Pro and MacBook Pro

What's really important, though, is what's inside. Acer has somehow managed to squeeze Intel's 8th-gen Core i7 CPU, along with Nvidia's new GeForce MX150, into the slender chassis. The CPU is quad-core with a 15-watt TDP, and Intel says it's up to 40 percent faster in some tasks. Nvidia's GeForce MX150 was actually announced in late May as a replacement for the elderly GeForce 940MX. Few hard specs are available on it, but we do know it uses GDDR5 and is based on the current Pascal architecture used in the GeForce GTX 10-series of cards. ... The combined advantage of Pascal graphics plus a quad-core CPU vs. the dual-core CPUs with integrated graphics—even Iris Plus—means the odds are very good that this new laptop/tablet will handily outperform both Microsoft's Surface Pro and Apple's MacBook Pro 13.

You Are Doing Analytics Wrong: Here Is Why

"If you're just showing me the same data in a new way, how will that show me what I should be thinking about going forward? Is it challenging me to think about how I can optimize my business model? Are there processes I need to tweak? How much money am I leaving on the table? Are we cannibalizing our own revenue? Those are the kinds of questions you should be able to ask of your data," said Kaila. Some organizations have hired a chief analytics officer or a chief data officer to ensure that data can be used as a strategic asset. That person is responsible for bridging the gap between business and IT, orchestrating resources, and driving value from analytics. "Leaders need to ensure accountability for insights," said Kaila. "If you do that, you'll be able to align the definitions, the processes and ultimately how you operationalize predictive insights."

Cloud computing and the costs: a love-hate relationship

Cloud users underestimate the amount of their wasted spend. While costs often appear low in the public cloud space at first glance, especially when temporarily using capacity, these costs quickly pile up when occupying resources on a permanent basis. Sizing plays another important role. Whether it’s regarding oversizing VMs or commissioning high-performance storage for non-critical data that is accessed infrequently, there are plenty of examples of how to put on “cloud fat”. While respondents estimate that around 30 percent is going down the drain, RightScale has measured actual waste to be between 30 and 45 percent. Despite an increased focus on cost management, only a minority of companies are taking critical actions to put governance in place with a quarter of all respondents citing managing cloud spend as their biggest challenge.

How AI Makes Brand Personalities Come to Life

It’s really interesting because we think about AI and robots replacing the workforce, but if you’re a writer, it’s a great time. If you’re a user-experience designer, this is like a renaissance because UX people have been stuck designing mobile apps and websites since the beginning. But now, we move into this voice and conversational space, which is completely a new frontier. For people who are studying philosophy and ethics, there’s a whole other new kind of movement called ethical engineering. A lot of these big tech companies are going to need to bring in people who truly understand ethics and policy and humanity. I think there are going to be some new jobs that emerge. For creative agencies, it’s an awesome time to innovate your creative product.…

Exclusive interview with Starling Bank’s founder and CEO, Anne Boden

There seems to be a misconception that traditional banks and financial services are more secure than new fintechs. There is that idea of a grandiose building with large Roman columns, and the image itself is very secure and solid. Traditional banks are built on core systems that were coded in the 1980s and ’90s, and a huge fear of overhauling these systems has to do with the fear of losing security. Our stack is built on AWS and there is some hesitation when it comes to cloud computing. Is the cloud safe? Where is it? How do you know that someone can't just retrieve vast quantities of data if there isn't a physical place to guard? But luckily, cloud computing is also highly securitised. There are a lot of companies that work specifically on cloud security such as F5, not to mention that Cisco and Microsoft also provide their own cloud security services.

Quote for the day:

The first step is the most important, if we never start we have no chance to finish. -- Gordon Tredgold

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