Daily Tech Digest - December 24, 2017

Quantum Computers Barely Exist—Here’s Why We’re Writing Languages for Them

Programming languages for classical computers are designed in a way that doesn’t require developers to know how a central processing unit works. The push now is to create high-level quantum programming languages that also shield developers from the complexities of quantum hardware.  The quirks of quantum computing create limitations that don’t exist in classical programming languages. One example: quantum programs can’t have loops in them that repeat a sequence of instructions; they have to run straight through to completion.  To deal with such issues, Q# works in conjunction with a couple of classical languages. Developers without quantum expertise can write their main programs in familiar languages and then use a Q# program when they want to engage quantum processing power.

This ICO is disrupting the Financial Services Industry

TrakInvest faced a rising demand from its community to move to blockchain and launch its own cryptocurrency. This currency known as the “TRAK” Token is based on Ethereum ERC20 standards. The token launch will introduce a reward economy where the producers of trading data, insights and sentiments will be globally rewarded in a transparent and frictionless manner. Backed by a powerful tech stack and the strength of Ethereum’s Open community network, the ecosystem has a strong technical foot holding.“The concept of social trading and the concept of cryptocurrency came together nicely because now we could actually set an incentivisation and a monetisation model not only for TrakInvest but also for its users” says Mr. Bobby Bhatia, Founder & CEO, TrakInvest TrakInvest will develop its current virtual equity trading platform to include virtual trading and simulation games for cryptocurrencies. TrakInvest will also launch AI powered Sentiment analysis tool for both equities and crypto-currencies.

Are The Benefits Of Blockchain Out Of Reach For Small And Mid-Size Businesses?

The chain is a program designed to execute tasks exactly as specified at the onset, without a designated moderator or manager. Instead, the chain is validated and monitored by each user within the network. The blockchain records transactions and duplicates them instantly across each user point. It’s this deceptively simple concept that serves as the foundation for expedited and trustworthy transactions. The exchange of money for goods or services goes back thousands of years to the earliest civilizations. Initially, transparency and assurance were easily attained. Things were tangible. You could see and touch items in the marketplace. However, as technology evolved, trust in the marketplace eroded in favor of the convenience that checks, credit cards and other monetary assets have ushered in. Blockchain offers the intimacy and speed of a peer-to-peer experience and the verification and security previously provided only third-party authorities.

Best Practices for Managing Enterprise Data Streams

It has been commonplace to write custom code to ingest data from sources into your data store. This practice is dangerous given the dynamic nature of big data. Custom code creates brittleness in dataflows where minor changes to the data schema can cause the pipeline to drop data or fail altogether. Also, since instrumentation must be explicitly designed in and often isn’t, dataflows can become black boxes offering no visibility to pipeline health. Lastly, low-level coding leads to tighter coupling between components, making it difficult to upgrade your infrastructure and stifling organizational agility. Today, modern data ingest systems create code-free plug-and-play connectivity between data source types, intermediate processing systems (such as Kafka and other message queues) and your data store. The benefits you get from such a system are flexibility instead of brittleness, visibility instead of opacity, and the ability to upgrade data processing components independently.

ML & AI: Main Developments in 2017 and Key Trends in 2018

If we look at the engineering side of AI, the year started with Pytorch picking up steam and becoming a real challenge to Tensorflow, especially in research. Tensorflow quickly reacted by releasing dynamic networks in Tensorflow Fold. The “AI War” between big players has many other battles though, with the most heated one happening around the Cloud. All the main providers have really stepped up and increase their AI support in the cloud. Amazon has presented large innovations in their AWS, such as their recent presentation of Sagemaker to build and deploy ML model. It is also worth mentioning that smaller players are also jumping in. Nvidia, has recently introduced their GPU cloud, which promises to be another interesting alternative to train Deep Learning models. Despite all these battles, it is good to see that industry can come together when necessary.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Predictive Analytics Model

What if a predictive analytics model could track and capture data related to all the content touch points that a customer interacts with before making a purchase, assign weights to each, and assign proportions of customer’s purchase numbers to each to calculate ROIs? With tools like Content Scoring, that’s possible. It uses CRM data and marketing automation to track customer journeys, and then assigns values to content touch points such as whitepapers, social media posts, blogs, emails, and e-books) to help you understand which marketing deliverables do and don’t work. Imagine the kind of sophisticated, targeted, and optimized content funnels you could create to connect prospects to products using such advanced tools. Though predictive models can result in predictable response rates, they don’t necessarily explain why response rates depend on certain factors.

Analytics in 2018: AI, IoT and multi-cloud, or bust

Kinetica's Negahban predicts that "Organizations will look for / demand a return on their IoT investments" and adds that "while it is a good start for enterprises to collect and store IoT data, what is more meaningful is understanding it, analyzing it and leveraging the insights to improve efficiency." This reminds us that IoT, Big Data analytics and machine learning are rather inseparable. The IoT enthusiasm among our predictors doesn't stop there. In an age when so any customer interactions are electronic, Ryan Lester, Director of Customer Engagement Technologies, at LogMeIn, insists that "IoT Will Save Consumer Brands." He adds that "embracing IoT at the time of customer engagement helps companies to create relationships with their customers and create an ongoing engagement that will help them better understand their customers' needs..."

This AI Learns Your Fashion Sense and Invents Your Next Outfit

Despite the current limitations, fashion seems ripe for an AI invasion; it’s an arena that has great data sets on customers’ interests, and there is a lot of money at stake. Amazon, for one, is already working on AI systems to provide a leg up in spotting fashion trends, and it has also done some work with GANs. Alibaba, meanwhile, just debuted FashionAI, a technology that can recommend items to shoppers on the basis of what they brought into the dressing room. Costa Colbert, the chief scientist at Vue.ai, a fashion AI startup that recently revealed a method for creating fake fashion models using GANs, says that as promising as the UCSD and Adobe research appears to be, it requires so much data that it might be helpful only for the biggest names in online retail. “If all the person does is come in and click one thing, you aren’t going to be able to do much,” Colbert says.

Products Over Projects

Product-mode is no longer limited to companies that sell software. It is common among so-called tech businesses enabled by tech platforms that stream content, e-tail, distribute mutual funds, find cabs, accommodation, flights, you name it. It is also catching on in the digital/product/engineering/IT departments at more traditional, old-guard businesses. For instance, Insurance Australia Group (IAG) recently moved away from projects to a more durable platform organization operating in product-mode. ANZ Bank is trying something similar. There are several, less-than-ideal variations of teams operating in product-mode. Some places use a halfway approach of project-mode funding and product-mode organization. Even the product-mode organization is not always build+run. Or the cross-functional teams consist of people reporting to different function heads.

10 Ways Cloud Computing Will Evolve In 2018

Spending on cloud services demonstrates just how rapidly usage has grown. In 2015, Gartner predicted that, globally, enterprises would spend $140 billion on on-premises data center systems. Since then, the rapid adoption of public and private cloud services has sparked a major reallocation of IT budgets. Enterprises are moving away from relying solely on on-premises data center systems and are boosting spending on IT infrastructure for deployment in cloud environments. The result, according to IDC, is that cloud services and infrastructure spending will reach $266 billion annually by 2021. The picture is even more complicated than that. Businesses are using and deploying private, public and hybrid clouds in a number of ways, shaping the direction of the space over the next 12 months.

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Quote for the day:

"You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought." -- Lauren Bacall

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Daily Tech Digest - December 23, 2017

What Metrics Should You Evaluate When Looking at Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

When it comes to hyperconverged infrastructure, some in the IT industry view the merits of hyperconverged infrastructure through the storage lens. This seems logical because hyperconverged technology offers many benefits on how we provision, consolidate, and manage storage. But the metrics that those select few look at are too focused on storage-specific features, such as the number of nodes or terabytes, rather than VM-related measurements commonly used for other software-defined infrastructures such as the cloud. Since hyperconverged infrastructure shifts the paradigm from managing infrastructure components to managing VMs, there should also be a shift in the metrics used to measure it. But with bias present among the vendors, how will customers find the true hyperconverged metrics that matter?

5 Sectors Blockchain Is Disrupting That Are Not Cryptocurrency

For a few years now, "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" have gone hand-in-hand. The blockchain concept is complicated, and involves constant-growth record lists linked together and secured through cryptography (think of the Cryptex from The Da Vinci Code). Each block of the chain envelops a hash pointer relating to the previous block, as well as transaction data and a timestamp. The idea of a blockchain isn't relegated to the infant-era cryptocurrency revolution. Massive worldwide corporations are beginning to incorporate blockchain technology into their systems. The technology behind the blockchain is far more valuable on a global scale than any market capitalization of cryptocurrencies. Here are five large sectors currently being disrupted by the potential of this technology

Europe Unveils Its Vision for a Quantum Future

The commission clearly expects large-scale quantum processing using one or more of these technologies within five to 10 years. Whether this will be done in Europe first is much less clear. Quantum simulation is the third area of investment. Simulating complex quantum properties on an ordinary computer is close to impossible. But quantum systems can be made to simulate aspects of other quantum systems more or less perfectly. Physicists are toying with various ways of doing this. The basic idea is to find a quantum system that is well understood, and easy to manipulate and measure, and then use that to simulate a system that is hard to manipulate and measure. The well-understood systems include ultra-cold atoms and molecules, ions trapped in magnetic fields, and superconducting circuits.

Events, Flows and Long-Running Services: A Modern Approach to Workflow Automation

The idea is backed by the Domain-Driven Design (DDD) community, by providing the nuts and bolts for leveraging domain events and by showing how they change the way we think about systems. Although we are generally supportive of event orientation, we asked ourselves what risks arise if we use them without further reflection. To answer this question we reviewed three common hypotheses:

Events decrease coupling; Central control needs to be avoided; and Workflow engines are painful. ... A more sensible approach to tackle this flow is to implement it in a dedicated service. This service can act as a coordinator, and send commands to the others -- for example, to initiate the payment. This is often a more natural approach, as in this case we would generally not consider this a good design if the Payment service had knowledge about all of its consumers by subscribing to manyfold business events triggering payment retrieval.

Here's What Two Millennial Blockchain Founders Have To Say About Cryptocurrency

With so many different reports, it can be hard to make sense of the cryptocurrency landscape. One thing’s for certain—Bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many promising blockchain projects sprouting up with millennials leading the way. From 24-year-old Vitalik Buterin who founded Ethereum, now the world’s second largest cryptocurrency to 26-year-old Justin Sun, who seeks to reinvent how digital creators get paid for their online content with TRON. ... “We don’t think you even need to hold dollars or pounds in the future we think people will literally be spending with their Mona Lisa tokens or with their gold or with their Apple stock, only what they want to hold not what they think they need to hold simply because it’s the only thing that’s accepted. People will literally be able to walk into McDonalds and pay with their Mona Lisa tokens and that’s why we created this company,” Gelderman says

Can RegTech Really Save Banks Billions Each Year?

The global investment banking industry is worth a few hundred billion dollars annually, as are both the audit and legal professions. And since the last decade or so, increased regulation has forced banks to devote around 10% of their salary costs to employing an army of compliance controllers to ensure that their transactions and processes meet the standards required by the law. And the stakes are high. Rogue traders, breaches of confidentiality, and reckless financial positions can expose financial institutions to fines, cripplingly negative publicity, and even prison sentences, not to mention huge financial losses. These stakes are what make banks the earliest adopters of many technological innovations. Banks are turning to Regulatory Technology (RegTech), chiefly Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Intelligence (IA) but also other developments in computing like blockchain

While Bitcoin Price Soars, Technological Advancements Continue in the Background

As such, it helps to assimilate any new or additional information in the context to help make more sense of it in comparison to other experiences. For example, imagine your buddy invites you to "catch some waves" and to your surprise, after two hours on the road you finally pull up to an indoor resort water park where they have one of those cool new "wave pools;" the waves are generated mechanically and are meant to impress, but not utterly frighten well-meaning vacationers. This is not the same as a trip to the beach right. The same can be said of traditional investment vehicles vs. cryptocurrencies and assets. Some key interactions with each are very familiar; however, the context of operating within a purely virtual universe where the data is publicly distributed and infrastructure is community owned is very important to how you choose to engage.

Our top 7 cyber security predictions for 2018

The Equifax and Anthem breaches were wake-up calls for many consumers, who are now asking questions about the safety of their online accounts. Most still have no idea about password alternatives or enhancements like multi-factor authentication (MFA) or risk-based authentication, but they are more aware that passwords alone no longer are enough. In fact, research done by Bitdefender shows that U.S. citizens are more concerned about stolen identities (79 percent) than email hacking (70 percent) or home break-ins (63 percent). This is important, because companies often cite a lack of demand for stronger authentication as a reason for not offering it. ... State-sponsored attacks might also spur countries to form alliances to fight them. “Increased attacks on critical infrastructure will drive countries to begin discussing cybersecurity alliances. Establishing these alliances will provide mutual defense for all countries involved and it will allow for the sharing of intelligence in the face of attributed nation-state attacks, not to mention agreements to not attack each other,” says Eddie Habibi, CEO of PAS Global.

Agile for Marketing and Communication

Agile ensures movement, flexibility, and connection, and ensures that the right people are involved in communication. It also provides communication professionals with tools to keep a grip on the development of communication and the use of resources within the field of internal stakeholders. This way you can cope better with change and be more in control of the project schedule and state. It also provides self-organizing teams that take their own responsibility and add value to the product that’s being delivered. Therefore, it helps to finish assignments in a short period of time by focusing and making prior choices. During the preparation of the event RIVM Kennisparade for example, I only interfered one time with the progress when I was asked by the product owner. Because we’ve directly involved users, stakeholders and the necessary other organizational disciplines in the process, we have ensured support during the whole organization of the event. And that is a very good way to add value to our products.

The internet is broken

The internet was built on decades-old technology. Today, the internet comprises billions of devices, every one of which is more powerful than those upon which the internet and the web were built. Storage is exponentially cheaper and wireless technologies mean that countries are developing web infrastructures that aren't built on undersea cables. Our phones can scan our fingerprints and faces, making payments secure. Emerging technologies such as the blockchain enable experiments in new models for file sharing and value exchange. So let's consider a thought experiment: if we were to reset the internet - shut everything down and start again, using 30 or so years of experience - would it still look the same? Or would we design something different… even better?

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Quote for the day:

"The sign of a beautiful person is that they always see beauty in others." -- Omar Suleiman

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Daily Tech Digest - December 22, 2017

New Year’s resolutions for CISOs

CISOs should focus on rationalizing, consolidating and integrating security technologies in 2018 with the goal of building a security operations and analytics platform architecture (SOAPA) that can collect, normalize, process, analyze and act upon the growing amount of security telemetry.  At the same time, organizations should research, test, pilot and deploy selective security tools offering artificial intelligence. Based upon ESG research, CISOs can get the biggest bang for their buck by applying machine learning algorithms to existing security tools such as endpoint security software, network security analytics, threat intelligence platforms and DLP. This can help improve security efficacy of installed technologies without adding complex new projects. Make a commitment to automate and orchestrate manual processes.In cybersecurity, whatever can be automated should be automated. This includes gathering data, analyzing suspicious files 

Be a More Effective CISO by Aligning Security to the Business

A key to building cooperation is to develop the skill of empathetic listening to engage your ears before you start hammering a message into people. You listen with the goal of understanding the other person’s point of view and acknowledging how they feel about the situation. Listen to people’s complaints. Users work in different contexts than IT and security. They have work that needs to get done that has nothing to do with your security policy. Listen carefully to their problems and then, once they’ve had their say, you can connect their jobs to the security mission.... To break down barriers and silos, you’ll need to align users’ daily practices with security. Hopefully your examination of organizational processes and goals provides the information you needed for this. It also is useful for framing your security messages in the language of the organization’s culture, not in terms of security culture.

Google slips Chrome stub into Microsoft's app store

Sources familiar with Google's plans said that the maneuver was meant to stifle the Chrome copycats the company thinks mislead Microsoft Store patrons into downloading worthless apps. Yet that left unexplained the real purpose Google had - Chrome wannabes have not overwhelmed the store - or why the company thought the applet would pass muster and make it into the store, or getting that far, that it would remain unnoticed by Microsoft for any amount of time. One motivation was forwarded by a Google software engineer, Chris Blume, who tweeted, "Microsoft denies Chrome the tools it needs to protect users when installed from the Windows Store.  So, we made a mini-app to help users get the full, safe version of Chrome. It was pulled." Later, after others asked him what Microsoft withheld from Google that prevented the latter's developers from crafting a UWP Chrome app, Blume replied, "Multiple processes is one example."

IT/OT Convergence and the Digital Supply Chain

Whatever the phraseology, the principle is the same. Advances in the manufacture of computer chips have enabled tiny-form sensors with a capacity to gather, receive and send information to be developed. They are applied to plant equipment, goods in transit, warehousing or other industrial assets, and embed both intelligence and connectivity into equipment. Now connected with each other and other systems, these assets can send and receive data about performance or any other parameter. Secure cloud technology then allows for seamless but flexible data handling and storage, as well as the compute power needed to perform advanced analytics that extract valuable insights into parts of the supply chain that were previously unavailable from the raw data. That analysis can open up a whole series of new possibilities through the development of new applications and APIs to derive even greater value from the original data.

The Future Of Cyber Threats Will Be Defined By Deception

Criminals have discovered the immense power of social engineering-based email attacks, which have become one of the most prominent types of cyber threats to many organisations. However, research suggests that current social engineering methods are nowhere near as effective as they could be. Recent developments suggest an impending watershed moment among Internet criminals, in which their yields can be doubled by use of sophisticated multi-factor social engineering techniques. One example involves the use of legitimate functionality or infrastructure – such as traditional password reset – in combination with deceptive email messages. By sending a reset code to an intended victim, then immediately following up with a deceptive email request for that code, criminals are able to harvest reset codes on a significantly larger scale. This gives them direct access to user accounts without setting off alarm bells by requesting that the intended victim enter a password.

Why Network Visibility Is Critical to Removing Security Blind Spots

In the client-server era, all traffic went from a computer, into the data center, to the core, and back. This is known as north-south traffic. Securing this type of traffic flow means putting big firewalls and other tools in the core of the network where traffic would be inspected as it passed through. Over time the folks at VMware figured out a way to virtualize workloads and send traffic between them, even if they are in another location of the data center. This is known as east-west traffic. The challenge in securing east-west traffic is that it never passes through the core, so it bypasses all your traditional (and expensive) tools, as well as new ones such as behavioral analysis. Organizations could try to deploy security tools at every possible east-west junction, but that would be ridiculously expensive and complicated. Network visibility tools allow security managers to see every east-west flow and then individually direct them to specific security tools instead of sending all traffic to all tools.

Your Top Five Challenges Moving in to the IoT Space

When you’re on the path towards a digital transformation, you end up with more connected … things. This newfound focus on software and digital experiences means that deploying software into more places. Integrating assets and data into existing infrastructure and systems are arguably what IoT is all about. Vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are making massive investments in their respective cloud platform to align with their customers’ demands for IoT-type solutions. Traditional technology vendors such as Schneider, Mitsubishi and Siemens are also on their toes, eager to be part of the new ecosystem. I’ve been involved in many IoT projects over the years and have come to realize that there is a big gap between what customers need and what these vendors provide. Not saying they should or even could solve all problems, but I’ll try to emphasize some of the areas organizations need focusing on.

Security platform or best of breed? There’s only one answer

Michael Cook, a senior security consultant at Indianapolis-based advisory Pondurance, says all-in-one platforms are generally made up of “about 15 applications or modules around that platform.” Each module addresses a different need, such as securing that API gateway. Cook cautions that not every module is equally strong and that with a single platform you risk a Jack of all trades, master of none scenario. Say, for example, the platform you use offers gateway security but isn’t great at it. Good luck getting management to approve a Forum Systems purchase. “When you’re using a platform versus best of breed, if there’s something you don’t like in one of the modules in the platform you’re kind of, ‘Well, we’ve gotta use it because we bought the whole thing,’” he says. Of course, just because a specialized tool might work better doesn’t mean all-in-one doesn’t offer any protection at all. The module is there.

The case for securing the SD-WAN

Enterprises can resolve this new spate of security challenges by moving their inspection and enforcement points away from the data center to either the branch or the cloud. Specifically, security administrators need to assess if they require security layers that consist of more than just encryption and general stateful firewall services. Then they need to ask whether there’s more risk in either the branch or the cloud, which will help determine what layers of security they will require. By nature, SD-WAN provides embedded security because of its native support for encryption end-to-end and segmentation on a per application or organizational level. However, the delivery of a comprehensive enterprise grade security solution is not wholly supported natively in numerous SD-WAN providers. So, how and what do you use to secure the branch that simultaneously serves as a direct pipeline for a maelstrom of malware and other threats?

Unsupervised Machine Learning Demonstrated On Quantum Computer

Rigetti announced that it was able to demonstrate unsupervised machine learning on its new 19-qubit quantum computer. Unsupervised machine learning refers to the neural networks being able to train on raw data without any pre-labeling of that data. The company achieved this with a quantum/classical hybrid algorithm for clustering data. Clustering analysis is one of the most common ways to do unsupervised machine learning in order to find hidden patterns within the analyzed data. It's often used in advertising, credit scoring, and image segmentation. This means that Rigetti’s quantum computer and its approach to hybrid quantum/classical algorithms could soon find uses in the real world. However, Rigetti warned that they still need more qubits in order to show that this solution is faster and more effective than purely classical approaches. This could be achieved once quantum supremacy is reached.

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Quote for the day:

"Never stop learning, because life never stops teaching." -- Unknown

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Daily Tech Digest - December 21, 2017

Who’s afraid of the big, bad bot?

In essence, AI has made it possible for customer service teams to focus more squarely on addressing and resolving customer needs through the automation of information gathering and other simple processes. ... The time savings alone means they can help more customers get the answers they need. That’s the ultimate end goal. Here’s something else to think about – and this goes against the beliefs of skeptics suggesting that AI will eventually replace humans altogether (which is just not reality). As intelligent as machine learning can be, it serves a very specific purpose today: to make humans more effective. AI is not and, in my humble opinion, will never be a full replacement for humans within a brand’s business, customer service operations, or otherwise. There are just certain things that humans can do that technology can’t. For all the efficiencies that AI and bots bring to the digital customer experience, there’s nothing that can ever replace a real “human touch,” especially in high-stress or complex situations.

 Technical Capacity Is The Biggest Challenge for Building Smart Cities

Elaborating further on the technology side of the whole story of Smart Cities, Kunal Kumar, Commissioner, Pune Municipal Corporation said, “The more advanced technologies like AI and machine learning are the tech capabilities which need to be enhanced. I believe that we should urgently come up with a Smart Cities academy where engineers and officers are trained to think and work on completely different paradigms.”  Kumar goes on to include that Innovation hubs are also required in every state and city where local entrepreneurs, startups and other industry partners get to come and experience what is required by these cities. "innovation hubs for entrepreneurs and industry partners can help them start rolling out their research and development accordingly. It is very important that we do this virtually as well as it is already performed on physical platforms."

Six Cybersecurity Predictions for The Year Ahead

In the year ahead, we’ll continue to see a distinct lack of in-house cloud expertise resulting in security troubles for many organizations. While cloud providers offer adequately secure platforms, users still have a responsibility to ensure they are doing their part toward securing their data in the cloud. This includes monitoring for security threats within the cloud environment, and equally ensuring cloud environments are properly configured. But, many IT and security professionals aren’t aware of their role in cloud security, or are aware but don’t know the best way to execute on their responsibilities. There have been countless cases in 2017 whereby enterprises have left private information publicly exposed, which has resulted in huge breaches. While most resulted from a failure to properly secure Amazon Web Services buckets, this is not the only cloud vulnerability. For example, many people also found that their information was shared publicly via Microsoft’s docs.com service.

Fintech Disruptors Warn: ‘You Can’t Use Past Solutions to Fix Future Problems’

The biggest challenge may be “how do we avoid using past solutions to solve future problems?” So, when we designed our solution, we really didn’t pull in any lenders. We didn’t want their perspective, because we knew we had to innovate something that wasn’t in the marketplace, and so we had to set ourselves up for success and just say “let’s not create any barriers or boundaries on how we want to deliver this.” We just had to understand the market need, and what was being delivered out there today, and make sure whatever we did surpassed that. ... We are a cloud solution provider, and that was somewhat challenging at the beginning – working with FIs that were not necessarily comfortable with the cloud. From the early stages, we decided to take on security and have been PCI certified for seven years. I think the industry has seen a shift, where financial institutions are now recognizing the benefits in working with cloud providers.

Frugal Innovation: Doing More With Less

Frugal innovation is at its core a mindset and hence can be, and should be, applied to each stage and various practices in the SDLC. In my firm, The Cobalt Partners, we work primarily in Africa, with clients who are often doing work where their customers earn and live on less than $1 a day, or where our clients simply have very limited budgets. We ask and answer the hard questions to develop a skinny form of the SDLC we’ve typically used in the developed world. How do we do this without pair-programming (!) since human resources are one of the most expensive? How do we reuse open source components? How do we effectively understand the context … is our design thinking phase well-executed? Who has to maintain this software afterwards? In fact, we provide hosting services in addition to software engineering services for over half our clients since many of our clients do not have staff who can provide or adequately advise them on local and cost-effective hosting solutions.

Financial Markets Regulatory Outlook 2018

Our first theme examines industry’s efforts to “get over the line” in terms of compliance. Our second theme is Brexit, and we set out what industry will need to do against a backdrop of political and regulatory uncertainty. Third, we look at the business model challenges posed by the macro-economic environment, competition initiatives, and regulatory change. Fourth, we examine whether and how industry efforts to utilise customer data in novel ways can be reconciled with new data protection rules and supervisory expectations of the fair treatment of customers. Fifth, we observe significantly higher supervisory expectations and approaches regarding the treatment of vulnerable customers. Sixth, we consider the ever-present threat posed by cyber attacks, and the increasing supervisory emphasis on cyber resilience. Last, but not least, we assess the evolving landscape for model risk management in an environment in which a large proportion of assets in the financial system

Ransomware of IoT will become a new security nightmare in 2018

The impact of ransomware on smart devices extends well beyond a criminal simply preventing a user from being able to access the data on their devices – it could also interfere with the functionality of the device itself, a situation that can have real, and potentially dangerous, physical implications. For example, ransomware that infects a smart thermostat could potentially turn up the heating to full in the middle of summer, or turn it off completely in the winter unless a ransom is paid. While this might be only an annoyance for most people, it could prove harmful to some vulnerable victims. An infected smart lock could lock people in or out of their houses, or remain permanently open, allowing full access to a victim’s home and belongings. Infection of smart fridges, smart bulbs, or any number of smart devices in a home, could also cause disruption.

Why Cisco, McAfee Say Security Vendors Must Share Threat Intel to Beat the Baddies

It differentiates the group from traditional Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) or Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs), said CTA President Michael Daniel. Prior to joining the CTA he served as special assistant to President Obama and cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council. Traditional threat sharing groups usually have low participation rates. They also don’t share information on a real-time basis or provide context. The CTA, on the other hand, requires members to submit a daily minimum. It uses a scoring algorithm to reward quantity, quality, and speed of submission. “We say you have to submit on average 10,000 points worth of intelligence per day,” Daniel said. “We weigh context and timeliness very highly. Don’t just tell me this is a bad binary, tell me what malware family it’s part of, what stage in the kill chain you think this belongs to, do you think this is a criminal or a nation state?”

Juniper brings AI bots to intent-based networks

It’s fair to say that all the great advancements the industry has seen in networking over the past few years — which includes the shift to software, increased adoption of white boxes, new operating systems, and the shift to software models — have enabled us to do so much more with our networks. But they have also increased the complexity of running a network. The shift to the cloud has also raised the importance of the network, as we are now literally connecting everything to the network. Businesses have had to hire more people with new skill sets just to maintain the status quo. Automation is something that network professionals seem more open to today than they did just a few years ago, but what to automate and how remains somewhat of a mystery. At the event, Juniper provided a data point from its research that found 43 percent of respondents said a lack of internal education and skills are preventing the use of network automation.

Security Worries? Let Policies Automate the Right Thing

In fact, most security breaches and system failures are the result of people not operating systems correctly. They forget to do something or give themselves permission to do an action, then leave that permission open so that bad actors can take advantage of it. These missteps could be avoided by a security approach that automatically directs, guides, or encourages system operators to do the right thing or blocks them from doing bad things. It is an enlightened security leader who prioritizes and budgets for this kind of security policy enforcement; without active and automated enforcement of policy, the breaches keep coming, costs keep rising, and heads keep rolling. To draw an analogy from the parenting world, the dominant security model today is the equivalent of raising kids only by punishing them when they do bad. A more effective approach is to encourage kids when they do the right thing — thereby building a decision-making framework in their frontal cortex that will override bad behavior. 

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Quote for the day:

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." -- Marcus Aurelius

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Daily Tech Digest - December 20, 2017

Where VC's Will Invest In 2018: Blockchain, AI, Voice, Pets

With the price of virtual currency bitcoin hitting new highs every other day and money raised from “initial coin offerings” for new cryptocurrency projects surpassing that of early-stage venture funding, venture investors are scrambling to develop a cryptocurrency strategy. Most firms can’t—or won’t—buy digital currency like bitcoin directly. But they’re high on the potential value of the underlying blockchain technology, and finding creative ways to pour money into the sector. David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, says he is exploring investments in apps that will run on the nascent crypto networks, much as smartphone apps run on either iOS or Android. His firm is also seeking investment opportunities in services around the cryptocurrency ecosystem, including institutional custody for cryptocurrencies, security, app distribution, and blockchain-based distributed file storage.

Convergence of Big Data, IoT And Cloud Computing For Better Future

Demand for big data is calling for the adoption of both IoT and cloud platforms. With IoT, the amount of big data will obviously increase. The adoption of IoT and big data compels a move towards cloud technology. According to IDC, “Within the next five years, more than 90 percent of all Internet of Things data will be hosted on service provider platforms as cloud computing reduces the complexity of supporting the Internet of Things ‘data blending.’” So, a company looking to transform the IoT data and utilize its potential first needs to fully embrace cloud-based systems. The number of IoT devices is expected to grow to 20 billion by 2020 whereas the big data industry is expected to have a worth of US$66.8 billion by 2021. These are the fastest growing sectors in IT and both are very much necessary for any technological innovation.

Do You Really Have Big Data, Or Just Too Much Data?

There is more data available to organizations today than ever before. In 2015 alone, customers, employees, and other users created about 7.9 zettabytes of data globally -- and that number is expected to reach 35 zettabytes in 2020. The type of information companies are collecting is also multiplying -- from traditional sources such as customer mailing addresses and phone numbers to more advanced demographics, web histories, shopping preferences, and even biometric data. Advances in technology, computer power, and analytics mean companies can collect and process data in almost real-time. This may lead executives to believe that the more data they have, the greater their advantage. However, collecting a virtually unlimited amount of data can create a serious threat for organizations, because the amount collected often outstrips the ability to protect it. ... If a company does have a data breach containing certain types of sensitive personal information, such as social security numbers or health records, it can trigger additional burdensome legal duties and invite increased regulatory scrutiny, not to mention potential reputational damage.

CPG Industry Levels Playing Field with Power of One

Digital Twins is a concept that exploits the “Power of One.” Picked by Gartner as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends in 2018, Digital Twins couples virtual and physical worlds to facilitate analysis of data and monitoring of systems in order to avert problems, prevent downtime, develop new opportunities and support planning via simulations But the Digital Twin concept isn’t new. The concept of a digital twin was originally developed by NASA in order to help manage unexpected “situations” that might occur during space travel. NASA grappled with the challenge of designing things that travel so far away, beyond the ability to immediately see, monitor or modify. NASA’s innovation was a Digital Twin of the physical system, a complete digital model that can be used to operate, simulate and analyze an underlying system governed by physics. This Digital Twin concept is being embraced throughout the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) world.

IT pros will need a diverse skill set to be employed in 2020

"The ability of an IT professional to work effectively on project teams for many different types of projects and, even better, be able to manage those projects, is already a critical skill and is only going to become more in demand," Peskay said. Some of that management will extend to finding and utilizing outside resources to solve business problems. IT professionals may be tasked with managing in-house personnel, as well as contractors, crowdsource platforms, cloud services, and other external resources. "An IT professional who is both familiar with and can engage successfully with all of these resource types will have a huge advantage in the marketplace," he said. The shifting IT landscape also means that IT professionals will need to acclimate to the ongoing changes. Soft skills such as emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility will help them adapt to both the marketplace and the constant fluctuations within the industry, said Holly Benson, vice president and organizational transformation consulting expert at Infosys.

The artificial intelligence computing stack

In the past decade, the computational demands of AI put a strain on CPUs, unable to shake off physical limits in clock speed and heat dissipation. Luckily, the computations that AI requires only need linear algebra operations, the same linear algebra you learned about in high school mathematics. It turns out the best hardware for AI speaks linear algebra natively, and graphics processing units (GPUs) are pretty good at that, so we used GPUs to make great strides in AI. While GPUs are good at linear algebra, their lead is being challenged by dozens of Chinese and American companies creating chips designed from the ground up for linear algebra computations. Some call their chips “tensor processing units” (TPUs), others call them “tensor cores.” It is no surprise these products even compete on the word “tensor”: it is a core concept from linear algebra used heavily in AI. All of these companies support running the TensorFlow software library, released by Google in November 2015.

Who's who in the cybersecurity market? The inside scoop for 2018

Predictions, schmedictions. The media is chock-full of them this time of year. So, we'll spare CSO readers from another look into the crystal ball. Instead here's some reality on how the cybersecurity industry looks as we enter the next calendar year. In a nutshell, big tech goes big cyber in 2018. Just about every major technology brand has advanced their position in cyber during 2017 — via product and service innovation, merger and acquisition activity, or simply reprioritizing the importance of security to its overall mix. Cybersecurity has long been a cottage industry composed of small point product companies, regional and national service providers, and a short list of unicorns ... Recent estimates by Cybersecurity Ventures puts global spending on cybersecurity at $1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021. The cyber crime epidemic — which is expected to cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015 — is fueling the market for cyber defense solutions. 

How to Create Digital Transformation That Sticks

Leaders who don’t internalize the changes and make them part of the ecosystem will find obstacles at every turn, Siobhan points out. “The minute they try to push it into business, or ask finance for more money, the whole machine comes to a grinding halt,” she explains. “I’m a big fan of asking, ‘What was that internal moment you realized this big digital transformation meant you, as a manager, were also involved?’” As an example she describes the process when she worked with the American Automobile Association (AAA), where the goal was to change the compensation plan for tow truck drivers. Despite having “really smart consultants and lots of data, we had the hardest time, they resisted, people were unhappy.” Eventually, Siobhan took it upon herself to learn how to drive a tow truck to understand just how hard these people’s jobs were. “You’ve got to do the work you’re asking of others.”

The 'always-connected PC' is coming, but its full cost remains unknown

Qualcomm executives said they expect Snapdragon PCs will be manufactured by traditional smartphone vendors as well. In some sense, that’s already happened, said Asus chief executive Jerry Shen. “Asus has a history of designing beautiful devices for both the PC and smartphone,” he said. “We are well positioned to bring to life the benefits of LTE.” Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft, recalled how he didn’t plug in a Snapdragon-powered PC for a week. “I’m seamlessly connected wherever I am: at work, commuting, visiting a customer at a hotel, at the airport—I’m always connected,” he said. “It feels like the natural way to work with all of my team, all of my partners.” Given its attendance at the Qualcomm event, Microsoft seems to view always-connected PCs as a sort of target of opportunity: More PCs mean more Windows licenses, and potentially more revenue.

Five mental shifts we must make to achieve security beyond perimeters

There was a time when keeping an eye on your network perimeter was sufficient to catch most threats. Today, that’s not the case. The 2017 Threat Landscape Survey from SANS found that endpoints and end users are now the front line of the battle against online threats. These are the most frequent targets for attackers who want to weasel into your organization’s network. Among the most common threats this past year were phishing and ransomware, both of which can often skirt traditional perimeter-based security solutions like firewalls and antivirus. Zero-day exploits, while less common, are a good example of how the most advanced threats laugh in the face of perimeter-based security. In light of this reality, understanding how the landscape has changed (and how it will continue to change) is the first key to better protecting your organization against the modern threat landscape.

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Quote for the day:

Honor bespeaks worth. Confidence begets trust. Service brings satisfaction. Cooperation proves the quality of leadership. -- James Cash Penney

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