Daily Tech Digest - September 16, 2018

EA & Open Standards For Oorganizational Transformation And Innovation

For a digital transformation to be successful, organizations need to have a digital strategy connected with the organization general strategic objectives. This implies that the transformation process should be pervasive through the whole organization, it is no longer and IT or automatization issue. Implies having new digital products and services, a new and more innovative business model, a more complex channel strategy, an aggressive digital marketing and developing the right capabilities to offer customers a good digital experience. All of this of course needs to be supported by technology capabilities and platforms. This can only be achieved if the whole organizational landscape is described and understood. An ‘architectural landscape’ essentially represents the different components of the business – including business processes and information technology resources – making it possible to modify existing operating models in order to harness new technological trends in an efficient and timely manner.

Leveraging Segmentation to Secure IoT

The biggest challenge facing most organizations is simply identifying and tracking all IoT devices connected to the network. Network Access Control allows organizations to authenticate and classify IoT devices securely. Real-time discovery and classification of devices at the point of access allows IT teams to build risk profiles and automatically assign IoT devices to appropriate device groups, along with associated policies. ... Once the network has identified IoT devices, IT teams then need to establish IoT attack surface controls. Segmenting IoT devices and related communications into policy-based groups and secured network zones allow the network to automatically grant and enforce baseline privileges for specific IoT device profiles. While inventory management tools can track these devices, and behavioral analytics can monitor their behavior, Internal Segmentation Firewalls (ISFW) need to be applied to enable organizations to not only quickly and dynamically establish and control network segments but also inspect applications and other traffic that need to cross segmentation boundaries.

How on-demand data officers can help fill the knowledge gap

CDOs are a crucial hire for any organisation looking to unlock the value of their data. Companies sit on a mountain of data, including marketing and sales, finance, HR and operations and to store, process, analyse and use this data effectively requires a specific set of skills. They have a broad role, encompassing parts of other c-suite roles. But some companies mistake it with the chief information officer (CIO). However, whereas the CIO deals with the technology, infrastructure and software/data engineering of a company, the CDO should be more commercially minded. As Pete Williams, former analytics head at M&S explains: “The CIO can have responsibility to ingest data. But for a CDO, we are talking about a level of commercial awareness that needs to come from the business.” They look at how data can be used by a business to gain a competitive and commercial edge. CDOs are more important than ever, especially now the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has become a business-as-usual requirement. Indeed, the hefty fine for infringing GDPR has helped to elevate data governance to board-level status.

The Future of Networking Is 5G: Businesses Must Prepare Now

Between now and 2020, a few things must still happen: The industry must complete the entire set of 5G standards. Even though most of the radio standards are defined, we have about another year of work on the core network standards. Expect to see both established service providers and startups, even some large enterprises, roll out localized wireless 5G networks over the next year. They will use slight modifications of the 4G core but take advantage of the current patchwork of 5G radio spectrum. Network trials and proof-of-concept applications will represent the bulk of those efforts. The real 5G core, with full network-slicing capability, will start to show up in large-scale production networks around 2020. Understanding 5G and its implications should be high on your company’s priority list. How will setting up a private 5G network slice improve your company’s critical applications, services and security processes? Could new network services open up revenue-generating opportunities?

The Smart City Trailblazers

Could smart canals ever become a reality? If so, Amsterdam is likely to lead the charge. As an early investor in smart technology, Amsterdam first hired a chief technology officer back in 2004, at a time before some of the foundational concepts of smart cities had terms we would recognize today. As with many smart cities, Amsterdam has long focused on transportation, and the use of satellite navigation technology and other sensor-derived data has provided a more pedestrian-friendly cityscape. The success of these transportation improvements is clear. The city had to update their traffic information in 2016, as the previous data, gathered in 2011, was already obsolete: In that time, the number of cars dropped by 25 percent, and the number of more efficient scooters rose by 100 percent. Amsterdam’s unified approach toward smart technology better enables it to combine both private and public efforts, leading to a cohesive approach that’s already paying off.

Safe Artificial Intelligence Requires Cultural Intelligence

Building machines that can perform any cognitive task means figuring out how to build AI that can not only learn about things like the biology of tomatoes but also about our highly variable and changing systems of norms about things like what we do with tomatoes. Humans live lives populated by a multitude of norms, from how we eat, dress and speak to how we share information, treat one another and pursue our goals. For AI to be truly powerful will require machines to comprehend that norms can vary tremendously from group to group, making them seem unnecessary, yet it can be critical to follow them in a given community. Tomatoes in fruit salads may seem odd to the Brits for whom Kington was writing, but they are perfectly fine if you are cooking for Koreans or a member of the culinary avant-garde. And while it may seem minor, serving them the wrong way to a particular guest can cause confusion, disgust, even anger. ... Norms concern things not only as apparently minor as what foods to combine but also things that communities consider tremendously consequential: who can marry whom, how children are to be treated, who is entitled to hold power, how businesses make and price their goods and services, when and how criticism can be shared publicly.

Bitcoin Blockchain Technology Implementation In India Not An Easy Task

There will be a complete transformation which will cost a fortune in the complete makeover along with a dedicated time. In addition to this, recruiting blockchain experts and data scientists is definitely much costlier as compared to hiring software developers. The biggest applications of blockchain rely on public frameworks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. All the parties can make transactions within the same network that is monitored. But the entire process is expensive and needs a lot of investment to keep it under operation. For a government projects or any public blockchain-based applications, the role of cost bearer in terms of network maintenance and the validation of transactions is still not clear. Despite all the issues, there is a significant rise in the number of blockchain developer requirement in the market. It is even alleged that cryptocurrency and blockchain jobs are gradually more appealing to job seekers from more conventional sectors especially in Asia.

Onelink: IoT Smoke Alarm Now Alexa-Enabled

Onelink Safe & Sound is not your ordinary smoke alarm. It is a smart IoT alarm that could detect smoke and carbon monoxide in your home or office. Powered by First Alert’s technology for smoke and carbon monoxide detection, it has an 85-decibel alarm, and it also sends notifications to your mobile phone if the device detects any smoke or carbon monoxide within the premise. It also has a built-in Alexa voice service which allows you to access all the features found on Amazon Echo. You can use voice commands on Onelink Safe & Sound to play your favorite music, audiobooks, control smart devices, and even have it read the news. Also known as an electrochemical gas sensor is a gas detector that measures the density of a target gas by oxidizing or decreasing the target gas at an electrode and measuring the resulting current. To get your very own Onelink Safe & Sound Smoke and CO alarm, check out their product page on Amazon for easy ordering. The device can currently be bought for $241.53. There are also bundles that tie in Amazon Echo devices, in case you’re looking to buy one.

Building the Pillars of Data Modeling and Enterprise Architecture

Ruff said, “ER/Studio doesn’t do the Data Governance for you,” but Data Governance can’t be done without an Enterprise Architecture solution like ER/Studio as a foundation, “because if you’re not managing your data at the low level, you can’t manage it at a higher level,” she said. Having a complete model of the data gives business users access to that global vision they need and a thorough understanding of the value of that data. “It’s extremely important that every single thing that an organization does has a data representation and a process representation,” in the model, “because it’s really through the modeling that we are able to improve our business processes, improve our data quality, and everything else,” said Huizenga. ... The consequences of non-compliance can be great, so it’s vital to fully understand how regulations affect business practices. “You will need to verify that the safeguards you have in place are indeed sufficient, rather than just assuming they meet the requirements.” Compliance is an active process and it’s imperative that companies implement the appropriate protections proactively.

Transforming The Transformative: The CMO's Role In Leading Digital Transformation

As a CMO, it’s important to remember that technology alone won’t ensure your company’s DX is a success. When Forrester identified the capabilities most vital to DX success, just four out of the top 10 are technology-based.  To accelerate digital transformation and drive revenue growth, CMOs must develop and redesign organizational capabilities like strategy, culture, change management, digital experiences, innovation management and customer journey mapping. Reshaping your culture to be customer-centric is essential in order to support continuous innovation and drive effective change throughout the organization. Unsurprisingly, data and analytics capabilities are most critical among technologies that drive digital transformation success. Modern marketers are data-driven, and in an age where customer experience is the ultimate factor that can make or break a brand, CMOs often rely on customer datawhen strategizing how to meet and exceed high customer expectations.

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Quote for the day:

"Great leaders don't need to act tough. Their confidence and humility serve to underscore their toughness." -- @SimonSinek

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Daily Tech Digest - September 14, 2018

Four industries Apple is set to disrupt

Apple has very clearly focused on healthcare, steadily building an in-house team of experts, most notably around medical devices who know how to work with regulators, researchers and IT. With the introduction of HealthKit, ResearchKit and CareKit, Apple has been at the forefront of unlocking personal health data and allowing users to share it with care teams, researchers and even first responders. Some of the broadest health studies ever conducted have relied on ResearchKit. iPhones and Apple Watches make it possible to contact emergency services and care-givers in seconds, and they provide key information about us using the emergency medical information card that can be accessed on an iPhone – even when the phone is locked. And increasingly, they alert us to signs of danger and disease that might otherwise go unnoticed. Apple is not slowing its efforts; in fact, it’s just getting started. The announcement this week of fall detection, complete with an understanding of different types of falls, is a major improvement aimed directly at older users.

Is Pattern Recognition Killing Innovation?

Underrepresented founders face greater challenges in convincing a fairly homogeneous industry that issues they are solving are significant enough, that the services they provide are widely needed and that they are the ones to take this vision into a multibillion dollar company. Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, and Shan Lynn Ma, founder of Zola (both multibillion dollar companies) have spoken out about their struggle to raise funding and felt it was due to the lack of diversity in the VC industry. "You can't blame the kind of individual for having that preference, but then you step back and realize 94% of venture investors are male and have similar preferences. And so, I think that it unquestionably made it harder," says Lake. In a sector that is driven by business ‘intuition’ and ‘gut feeling’ based on past patterns, female founders and other underrepresented founders, lose out. This is, to some extent, due to what experts call “homophily” in which similarity breeds connection, which means VCs prefer to hire, invest in, or co-invest with those that are similar to themselves.

Outcomes-based security is the way forward

“We are still finding the same problems every year that we have found in previous years, with things like credential theft and abuse still common, and multifactor authentication – especially for privileged accounts – still rare, even though this would reduce the attack surface massively,” he says. The only real change, he adds, is that there is now a lot more on the corporate IT network, with “almost everything” connected and online as business processes become increasingly digital and the dependency on IT is greater than ever before. “But businesses still assume that if they have spent millions on security products everything is fine, but bad guys usually work out what has been done to make something more secure and will find a way around it, so it is a continual arms race,” he says. As a result, Raeburn believes most cyber security technology innovations tend to provide a false sense of security for organisations because they will be effective only for a limited period of time.

Fighting the fear of new tech with the chief technology evangelist

Training is also paramount, and should be conducted in virtual or test environments as much as possible, long before the new technology goes live. It’s also important to remember that every employee will need to transition to a new technology at a pace that works for them which won’t interfere with their primary objectives. This can be especially important in organizations like healthcare, where doctors and other clinicians can’t be pulled away from their patients, or afford to slow down the treatment process due to the implementation of a new technology. Getting buy-in and acceptance from the workforce that will be using any new system is critical, since they will ultimately make or break the project. And for that to happen, the new technology needs an advocate, someone who can rally the troops and make people actively excited about the pending change long before the wheels start to turn on a new project.

Mobile fraud is increasing, attack rates rising 24% year-over-year

Financial institutions were besieged with 81 million cybercrime attacks in the first half of 2018 on the ThreatMetrix global network. Of these, 27 million were targeting the mobile channel as fraudsters turn their attention to the success story that is mobile banking adoption. Financial services mobile transactions are growing globally, with China, South East Asia and India showing the strongest regional growth. This indicates that the mobile channel is a key enabler for financial inclusion in emerging economies. Overall, the biggest threat in financial services comes from device spoofing, as fraudsters attempt to trick banks into thinking multiple fraudulent log in attempts are coming from new customer devices, perhaps by repeatedly wiping cookies or using virtual machines. Mule networks also continue to negatively impact the global banking ecosystem, particularly as financial crime becomes an ever-more sophisticated and hyper-connected beast. The challenge for financial institutions is detecting mule activity even when individual account behavior may not trigger red flags.

Smartwatches finally evolve into a viable platform

The Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform allows for a pervasive display, and the watches have battery life measured in days, not hours. This means that a watch maker can create a watch with a pervasive, attractive face designed to work with the watch case and look good to others, not just the watch user. Therefore, companies like TAG Heuer and Louis Vuitton (who owns TAG Heuer and Hublot) are now planning on releasing smartwatches by year’s end.  Finally, we have smartwatches that embrace the idea of a watch being a showcase of wealth and status. The part the watchmakers need to address is collectability…and that suggests a modular approach, where the movements and the cases are separate. That way you can buy and collect cases and then insert your up-to-date smartwatch component (which will then morph its display to match the case it’s placed in). I’m aware that TAG Heuer was working on a project like this about a decade ago, so my money is on them getting this right first.

Supermicro unveils an insanely fast, insanely thin storage server

The new Supermicro product, the SSG-1029P-NMR36L, has 36 18TB NF1 drives in its 1U chassis, doubling the capacity of a model introduced in January with 288TB. The server also comes with two 28-core Xeon SP processors and holds up to 3TB of memory in 24 DIMM slots and dual 16-lane PCIe network cards. The NF1 drives are all front-loaded and hot-swappable using the NVMe protocol for high-capacity network storage and very low latency performance. The optimized power profile of the fully hot-swap-capable NF1 devices means more processing power can be reserved to drive IO with the fastest CPU and memory available. "At Supermicro, we consistently offer our customers early access to the very latest and best technologies," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro, in a statement. "Our 1U NF1 storage server features the most power-efficient, next-generation flash technology with the highest storage density and best IOPS performance. This provides a real time-to-value competitive advantage for users with data-intensive workloads like big data, autonomous driving, AI, and HPC applications."

When to use a CRDT-based database

Everything looks good with the eventual consistency model until there are data conflicts. A few eventual consistency models promise best effort to fix the conflicts, but fall short of guaranteeing strong consistency. The good news is, the models built around conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) deliver strong eventual consistency. CRDTs achieve strong eventual consistency through a predetermined set of conflict resolution rules and semantics. Applications built on top of CRDT-based databases must be designed to accommodate the conflict resolution semantics. In this article we will explore how to design, develop, and test geo-distributed applications using a CRDT-based database. We will also examine four sample use cases: counters, distributed caching, shared sessions, and multi-region data ingest. My employer, Redis Labs, recently announced CRDT support in Redis Enterprise, with conflict-free replicated data types joining the rich portfolio of data structures—Strings, Hashes, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Bitfields, Geo, Hyperloglog, and Streams—in our database product.

14 Things I Wish I’d Known When Starting with MongoDB

MongoDB’s security checklist gives good advice on reducing the risk of penetration of the network and of a data breach. It is easy to shrug and assume that a development server doesn’t need a high level of security. Not so: It is relevant to all MongoDB servers. In particular, unless there is a very good reason to use mapReduce, group, or $where, you should disable the use of arbitrary JavaScript by setting javascriptEnabled:false in the config file. Because the data files of standard MongoDB is not encrypted, It is also wise to Run MongoDB with a Dedicated User with full access to the data files restricted to that user so as to use the operating systems own file-access controls. MongoDB doesn’t enforce a schema. This is not the same thing as saying that it doesn’t need one. If you really want to save documents with no consistent schema, you can store them very quickly and easily but retrieval can be the very devil. 

Four key considerations for evaluating graph warehouses

Organizations should also evaluate graph databases in terms of how much reading and writing they’ll require. GOLAP systems mostly read data for query purposes. Since data warehouses are usually batch jobs, their writing capabilities aren’t as important as their ability to swiftly query data for answers. However, the performance of batch loading is crucial. OLTP systems are constantly updating small portions of their transactional data via their writing capacity. For example, tollbooths are continually reading the license plates of vehicles and updating transactional data for passing motorists. Other examples include point-of-sale (POS) checkout systems, either for e-commerce or physical shopping locations. The same data from the tollbooths or consumer checkout is subsequently used by OLAP systems for establishing highway systems improvements, or pricing and marketing options for POS. Another defining attribute of OLTP and OLAP systems is the type of query required. In general, OLTP systems are primed for answering narrow, well-defined questions. 

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Quote for the day:

"It's very important in a leadership role not to place your ego at the foreground and not to judge everything in relationship to how your ego is fed." -- Ruth J. Simmons

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Daily Tech Digest - September 13, 2018

Edge computing: What to look for when selecting an edge database

As the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing continue to evolve, doors open for conducting business in new ways, especially when it comes to data management on the edge. Until recently, most data collected on the edge (at or near the collection point) was sent to the cloud or a data center for analysis and storage or discarded. A new, third option has become available: Databases that operate on edge hardware. However, not just any database will do. It should be a database that is specifically built for use in the unique environment of the edge. A database that is truly built for use on the edge will empower organizations with the ability to store and process their data at or near the collection point, setting the stage for mission-critical, and possibly, life-saving decisions to be made much faster and very reliably, without the need to rely solely on the cloud. There is no single database solution that fits all, rather each business should look to its unique case on the edge in order to determine the best choice. Having said that, there are a number of questions that should be asked when choosing a database for use on the edge:

NCSC issues core questions to help boards assess cyber risk

The NCSC’s advice comes after the FTSE 350 Cyber governance health check report 2017 found almost 70% of boards have no training in how to deal with cyber incidents, and 10% have no plans in place should they face a cyber threat. Martin claimed that since cyber security is now a major business risk, board members should aim to understand it “in the same way they understand financial risk, or health and safety risk”. This means encouraging boards to ask questions about the state of cyber in their businesses to make sure they are as much a part of the discussion around security as they are other parts of the firm. Boards were used as focus groups by the NCSC to develop appropriate guidelines that teach board members and their staff to understand, recognise and address threats to their businesses. Martin said these were a “taster of the sort of simple, useful but technically authoritative guidance we will be putting out to business” before the launch of a broader toolkit, developed by experts in cyber security, which will be released later this year.

6G will achieve terabits-per-second speeds

“Millisecond latency [found in 5G] is simply not sufficient,” Pouttu said. It’s “too slow.” One of the problems that will be encountered in 5G overall is related to required scalability, he said. The issue is that the entire network stack is going to be run on non-traditional, software-defined radio. That method inherently introduces network slowdowns. Each orchestration, connection or process decelerates the communication. It’s a problem in part because the thinking is that “there will be 1,000 radios per person in the next ten years.” That’s going to be because the millimeter frequencies that are being used in 5G, while being copious in bandwidth, are short in travel distance. One will need lots of radioheads and antennas—millions—all needing to be connected. And it is why one needs to think up better ways of doing it at scale—hence 6G’s efforts. ... “Data is going to be the key,” Pouttu said. The algorithm’s connection needs a trusted, low-latency and high-bandwidth application. That is where 6G comes in.

Everything You Need to Know About AutoML and Neural Architecture Search

Many people are calling AutoML the new way of doing deep learning, a change in the entire system. Instead of designing complex deep networks, we’ll just run a preset NAS algorithm. Google recently took this to the extreme by offering Cloud AutoML. Just upload your data and Google’s NAS algorithm will find you an architecture, quick and easy! This idea of AutoML is to simply abstract away all of the complex parts of deep learning. All you need is data. Just let AutoML do the hard part of network design! Deep learning then becomes quite literally a plugin tool like any other. Grab some data and automatically create a decision function powered by a complex neural network. Cloud AutoML does have a steep price of $20 USD and unfortunately you can’t export your model once it’s trained; you’ll have to use their API to run your network on the cloud. There are a few other alternatives that are completely free, but do require a tad bit more work.

10 Questions To Ask Before You Use Blockchain

According to Gartner (via PwC), 82% of use cases for blockchain were in the financial industry in 2017, but 2018 has seen a broadening out of use cases, with only 46% related to financial services. Other big verticals where blockchain experimentation is going on include transportation, retail, utilities, manufacturing, insurance, health care and government. The biggest use cases are asset tracking in transportation and government; record-keeping in utilities, health care and insurance; provenance in retail; and securities trading. Because of the hype surrounding blockchain, we are increasingly seeing it being used in situations where better or simpler methods may suffice, such as a database with application logic. Brian Scriber's recent paper in issue No. 4 of IEEE Software gives a great framework for evaluating if a blockchain is applicable in a given situation. Based on that paper and framework, we developed the following simplified list of 10 questions leaders should ask before they embark on using blockchain to address a specific need

Digital Twins Concept Gains Traction Among Enterprises

Digital twins are software models of sensor-enabled physical assets and designed to monitor performance and help reduce costly unplanned equipment outages. The convergence of advanced technologies such as sensors, cloud services, big data and machine learning has brought this idea to fruition. By 2020, at least half of manufacturers with annual revenues in excess of $5 billion will have at least one digital twin initiative launched for either products or assets, according to Gartner Inc. Schneider is among several companies selling software to help customers develop digital representations of physical assets, such as pumps and motors at oil and gas plants and machine building companies. One part of the software also allows customers to calculate the long-term maintenance and estimated potential profit of operating, say, a turbine for a few hours more a day. This is a new source of revenue for the company, with business has accelerating after Schneider’s reverse takeover of British engineering software provider Aveva Group PLC

AI is fueling smarter collaboration

The first is improving the ability of individuals to access data. "Today, finding a document could be tedious [and] analyzing data may require writing a script or form," Lazar said. With AI, a user could perform a natural language query -- such as asking the Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) platform to display third quarter projections and how they compare with the second quarter -- and generate a real-time report. Then, asking the platform to share this information with the user's team and get its feedback could launch a collaborative workspace, Lazar said. The second possible benefit is predictive. "The AI engine could anticipate needs or next steps, based on learning of past activities," Lazar said. "So if it knows that every Monday I have a staff call to review project tasks, it may have required information ready at my fingertips before the call. Perhaps it suggests things that I'll need to focus on, such as delays or anomalies from the past week." Another example is improving the use of meeting tools. 

Blockchain Is Changing How Media and Entertainment Companies Compete

In particular, several new business models are emerging in the media and entertainment industries, where monetizing value has been — and continues to be — a significant challenge. Newspapers and magazines, for instance, still struggle to monetize value in the face of plentiful free content and limited mechanisms for protecting intellectual property. Advertising revenue, long an important income source for publications, has shifted to social media and search platforms, and media companies must figure out how to compensate. In the music world, to cite another example, digital content distribution via streaming is beneficial to major record labels and top-tier artists. But it isn’t commercially viable for smaller labels or average musicians, who receive only a tiny fraction of the revenue generated from their music. Some experts think blockchain may increase the share of revenue captured by content creators and producers by introducing new mechanisms for monetization. However, the current hype about blockchain, the diversity of use cases being proposed, and their potential disruptive effects make it difficult for companies to judge what might be possible for them and what’s merely a pipe dream.

The Four X Factors of Exceptional Leaders

In defining “best-performing leaders,” we focused on a number of factors, but gave priority to actual delivery against the organization’s strategy: the clarity and alignment those leaders generated and the pace of the transformation they were able to drive successfully. In other words, we prioritized the “how” of their leadership, while also considering the “what” of their results. Although our analysis did consider share price as a factor, we weighted it lower than actual performance against strategic goals. For example, one tech company in our data set announced a major shift to mobility and the cloud, and subsequently initiated a round of expensive acquisitions, most of which ended up being wound down or spun off at a discount because they weren’t scalable. The share price remained steady during the period, mainly because of efficiencies created in managing the legacy business, but the future planks of its strategy remained largely unrealized. Our analysis discounted leadership’s effectiveness based on that failure.

Tech Companies Poach AI Talent from Universities

It's not a new trend, and many companies have done it, from Microsoft to Google to Facebook. But it seems to have picked up steam in recent years as organizations are scrambling to hire machine learning and AI talent in a very tight market. "We've done it too," said Eric Haller, executive vice president and global head of Experian DataLabs, an analytics and machine learning R&D organization inside the credit reporting bureau company. He recently spoke with InformationWeek in an interview. "We've recruited professors in London and Sao Paulo. Our chief scientist there was a top professor and still teaches at the University of Sao Paulo…It's definitely a trend." For some academics, making a move to industry can mean a big boost in pay -- after all, AI and machine learning skills are in high demand and highly paid. Even universities that pay their top professors well won't be able to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. There are benefits beyond financial rewards, too.

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Quote for the day:

"The mediocre leader tells The good leader explains The superior leader demonstrates The great leader inspires." -- Buchholz and Roth

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Daily Tech Digest - September 12, 2018

Smart Cities: How They’ll Make Us Healthier

Pollution is inevitable in large cities. However, smart cities will be better equipped to detect pollution and enable experts to reduce it. Already, cities are installing air quality sensors to find out where air quality can be improved, enabling cities to detect sources of pollution that might have gone undetected in the past. Sensors have already revealed that pollution hot spots can occur in unexpected places, and steps taken to reduce air pollution will improve the health of all residents. Smart cities are also better able to tackle water pollution. Sensors can detect where water is being polluted, letting planners uncover where pollution is entering nearby bodies of water. Furthermore, sensors can be installed to detect lead and other pollutants in drinking water on a more fine-grained basis, enabling health officials to act more promptly and prevent infections and poisoning.... Television and radio are often used by cities to provide health information to residents. However, people are increasingly turning to the internet for information, and they might miss out on local health alerts.

RabbitMQ in Microservices

RabbitMQ is one of the simplest freely available options for implementing messaging queues in your microservices architecture. These queue patterns can help to scale your application by communicating between various microservices. We can use these queues for various purposes, like interaction between core microservices, decoupling of microservices, implementing failover mechanisms, and sending email notifications via message brokers. Wherever two or more core modules need communicate with each other, we should not make direct HTTP calls, as they can make the core layer tightly coupled and it will be difficult to manage when there are more instances of each core module. Also, whenever a service is down, the HTTP call pattern will fail, as after a restart, there is no way to track old HTTP request calls. This results in the need for RabbitMQ. In microservice architecture, for this demonstration, we will use an example pattern of sending email notifications via various core microservices. In this pattern, we will have a producer, any of the core microservices, which will generate the email content and pass it on to the queue.

Why Python is so popular with developers: 3 reasons the language has exploded

Python has the best claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language right now, said Stack Overflow data scientist Julia Silge. Developer Stack Overflow visits to Python have grown very quickly, she added: This year, it became the most visited programming language in the world on the site. The rate of growth is high across industries including academia, manufacturing, electronics, finance, energy, tech, and government, Silge said. It's not shrinking in any industry, she added. "The rise of Python is linked to businesses understanding that they are generating all this data all the time, and if they either train people internally or hire people who have these skills, they can use that data to make better decisions, and it can help their businesses thrive," Silge said. "It's a great first programming language to learn, and also it is a center of one of the most impactful trends driving how businesses are adding value to what they're doing right now."

Multi-cloud strategy: Determine the right cloud for your workloads

The skills revolve around managing, configuring and maintaining the different cloud service provider’s environments. So, for AWS it is being able to handle and manage all of the AWS configurations, deployment and features that are being brought in. Same thing for Azure and Google Cloud. It’s setting up the network infrastructure, setting up the firewall, setting up the virtual cloud environments. Each one of the vendors does that in a different way; there’s no one-size-fits-all that will work across all of the environments. My highest recommendation for anybody going into the cloud is automating their environment as much as possible, but the script automations are different in each one of those environments. I can automate building my workload in AWS, but I can’t take that same script and run it in Azure to build my workload environment there.

8 Cryptomining Malware Families to Keep on the Radar

Cryptojacking activities that bleed off victims' compute power to mine for cryptocurrency have skyrocketed, as cybercriminals find it to be one of the most profitable low-key attacks on the Web today. It has even pushed out ransomware as cybercriminals' favorite means of raking in cash. While cryptomining malware may not be calibrated specifically to steal data, it should remain on the radar of enterprise defenders. Campaigns carried out by these malicious tools do real damage to computing equipment and siphon off vast amounts of electricity, never mind the fact that their infections are the perfect foothold to carry out other kinds of devastating lateral attacks. Here are some of the most prevalent and powerful cryptomining malware families active today. Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading.

Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning

There are alternatives – not many – that range in technical sophistication from tools with GUIs that can ease you into performing the essentials of network maintenance to more advanced software that is similar to Nmap itself. ... You don't need to install either one on a computer. Each is an executable that you can launch right away, running from a USB flash drive, for example. Advanced IP Scanner is designed to scan LANs. Through its GUI, it shows you all the computers and other devices connected to your LAN. Scan results can be exported to a CSV file. You can also access shared folders on a computer or device, control them remotely (using RDP and Radmin), or shut down a computer or device. Advanced Port Scanner scans for open ports on network computers and other devices, and it shows any version information it finds for programs running on detected ports. Commands can be executed on remote computers or devices, and resources can be accessed from them via FTP, HTTP, HTTPS or shared folders. As with Advanced IP Scanner, you can remote-control a computer or device on the network using RDP and Radmin, or you can shut it down.

What is Microsoft’s Intune – and how well does the UEM tool really work?

Intune is designed to give IT admins an easy way to manage a variety of devices – whether corporate or personal – in a way that protects corporate data while still allowing employees to get their jobs done. It combines mobile device management (MDM) capabiltiies with mobile application management (MAM) features and puts them all in a single console. Though obviously tied to Windows 10 and other Microsoft products, it is designed to manage hardware running other operating systems. Intune's arrival seven years ago came as companies were being forced to manage a sudden onslaught of devices accessing corporate data and networks – fallout from the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend that took off after the release of Apple's iPhone in 2007. "Even if the workers are not mobile all the time, the way we do business today requires a different approach, and that's where Intune comes in," said Maura Hameroff, Microsoft's director of security product marketing. As a subscription service, Intune charges companies on a per user/per month basis. It can be purchased as a stand-alone product for $6 per seat or for $8.74 per seat as part of Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility Suite

Scaling Business Agility: Three Essential Pillars for Being Vs. Doing Agile

If each business unit within an organization operates as a separate function, this has to be the first candidate for transformation. Even before we align the cadence and processes, it’s important to ensure everyone understands the purpose of working together. System thinking evolves as we help the team understand the vision and purpose. Top management must be aligned before a team gets involved. Transparency and working agreements within and across teams are vital in building a healthy culture. It’s at all levels, not just top or middle management. This is about enabling and adding value at every level in the ecosystem. It starts with product management who plays a crucial role in identifying and communicating value to the entire stream. From Engineering and Support to Program Management and Sales, everyone has a role to play in the value ecosystem. Those leaders must be identified and nurtured by management and the leaders need to hone their skills, not just to show or lead, but to be part of the journey.

Are You the Barrier to Innovation?

Risk aversion gets embedded in a culture and often reflected in structure, unspoken values, and the architectures that support it. Such architectures are heavily redundant, often held in datacenters controlled by the organization, monitored to within an inch of life (which can also lead to the Sisyphean chore of wringing out every ounce of performance), and protected by layers of security and abstraction. The goal is stability, but its price is stagnation. The fear of additional complexity also leads to risk aversion in trying new technologies even for small, non-critical projects. All too often, these projects can grow into core pieces of functionality that other systems rely on. An organization with an agile mindset will isolate such systems and abstract their functionality behind an API, but traditional IT operations would prefer to avoid them completely as they require knowledge dependencies that complicate the hiring process and add to the list of expertise the team must gain.

7 Costly Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make in The Digital World

In theory, SEO is very simple. Find and use the right keywords and Google will rank it near the top of any searches--thus making your business easily found by potential customers. But like many things, while the theory is simple and straightforward, the practical implementation of it is anything but. The rules for SEO are constantly changing and the internal workings can often be complex enough to give even Einstein a headache trying to figure it out. And once you have figured it out, you need to get the balance right between not enough SEO and too much SEO. Unless your business is SEO, then you're not going to have the skills to keep up, nor the time to divert from your core business to deal with it. A bit like plumbing, it seems easy, but it's much easier to get an expert in than it is to clear up the potentially costly mess getting it wrong. If you want to get your website found, then you need to make sure that you have the right keywords. These are the words or phrases that people are searching for on Google. The better your SEO keywords, the higher your business will rank.

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Quote for the day:

"You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right." -- Phil Crosby

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Daily Tech Digest - September 11, 2018

Protecting PHI on Devices: Essential Steps

"Anyone with physical access to electronic computing devices and media, including malicious actors, potentially has the ability to change configurations, install malicious programs, change information or access sensitive information," the Department of Health and Human Services notes in September edition of its monthly e-newsletter advisory. While HIPAA requires covered entities and business associates to limit physical access to their electronic information systems and the facilities in which they are housed, organizations are also required to implement policies and procedures that govern the receipt and removal of hardware and electronic media containing electronic PHI into and out of an organization's facilities, as well as their movement within a facility, the HHS Office for Civil Rights notes. Implementing processes to govern the movement of electronic devices and media may vary depending on the type of device and media, the agency states. ... Organizations can use various methods to govern and track the movement of electronic devices and media, the agency explains.

5 top strategies to make development cycles more efficient

Transparency and project visibility is important. Both are required for teams to learn, research and implement changes. Changes could only be responded to if everyone on the team, from development to administration, are on the same page. Daily and weekly meetings are structured within larger time frames, sometimes referred to as sprints. These time frames define overarching goals. If implemented at regular intervals these time periods, or sprints, can be a great time to reframe, reassess, and retune the development process. It is important in modern software development environments to keep a steady, methodical pace. Only through continual communication and review is this possible. The needs of the client, customer or user need to come before implementing tools. Often we fall in love with certain tools and processes within software development, but it is important to understand that these tools and processes are only as useful insofar as they help empower our clients, customers and users. Anything that hinders customer satisfaction must be cut out.

The use cases, challenges and benefits behind retail AI

Decades on, retailers now collect so much customer data from so many different people that it is impossible to offer this personalised service without the help of technology. As pointed out by Brian Kalms, partner and retail lead at consultancy Elixirr, some retailers have so much data there is no longer the option of analysing it by hand, especially when adding new online ventures into the mix.  “Historically, when you went into a store, you didn’t identify yourself,” he says. “Online brands know who you are, so retailers are going to have to learn to be data-savvy, and that’s one of the first applications of AI – it’s been in the form of bots and communications, and it’s moving into data analysis.” Where retailers used to categorise their customers in a “simplistic way”, now data can be used to better understand customers individually. For example, using old customer demographics based on socio-economic background, earnings and gender, a consumer who buys high-end food but “value” tissues should not exist, be we know this isn’t the case.

5 Tips for Integrating Security Best Practices into Your Cloud Strategy

Agility, resilience, and speed are baked into the development of every cloud implementation; they are why organizations adopt cloud-first strategies. But without the proper tools, sys admins can't effectively manage and protect their evolving cloud landscape, negating these benefits. As you plan your cloud strategy, the right tools and a detailed road map are essential for supporting a successful transition. Start by assuming that at some point, if not already, some of your workload will move to the public cloud, so you'll really be managing a hybrid environment. Next, it's highly like that the people supporting your data center will also support your cloud, so to avoid misconfigurations and minimize complexity, adopt management and security solutions that support hybrid cloud scenarios. It's also likely your environment will evolve to include more than one cloud service. Whether through a merger or acquisition, adopted in a development lab or acquired elsewhere, you may be faced with a combination of Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and/or Google cloud environments. 

Why your company needs an open source program office

We seem to be very confused about what constitutes an "open source company." Tobie Langel has asked if Mozilla and Microsoft are open source companies. The majority (78%) think Mozilla is, and an almost equivalent percentage (67%) think Microsoft is not. Yet, Microsoft contributes orders of magnitude more open source code than Mozilla. The reality is that both organizations qualify as "open source companies." Hopefully yours does, too. ... It would be tempting to think that an open source program office is a lagging indicator of open source activity, but in my experience it's actually a leading indicator, and a causal factor. As my colleagues Fil Maj and Steve Gill presented at the recent Open Source Summit in Vancouver, a good open source program can remove roadblocks to participation. We've seen Adobe go from a top-32 contributor (based on active GitHub contributors) to top-16 in a year, with a refactored contribution process a major driver to that change.

Standard to protect against BGP hijack attacks gets first official draft

Back in October 2017, two US government agencies, the aforementioned NIST and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate, started a joint project named Secure Inter-Domain Routing (SIDR) with the explicit purpose of securing the BGP protocol from such attacks. "The overall defensive effort will use cryptographic methods to ensure routing data travels along an authorized path between networks," the NCCoE at NIST said in a press release at the time. "There are three essential components of the IETF SIDR effort: The first, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), provides a way for a holder of a block of internet addresses--typically a company or cloud service provider--to stipulate which networks can announce a direct connection to their address block; the second, BGP Origin Validation, allows routers to use RPKI information to filter out unauthorized BGP route announcements, eliminating the ability of malicious parties to easily hijack routes to specific destinations.

How the TOGAF Standard Serves Enterprise Architecture

Businesses thrive off change to deliver new products and services to earn revenue and stay relevant. But throughout a business’s lifetime, new systems are created, mergers require system integration or consolidation, new technologies are adopted for a competitive edge, and more systems need integration to share information. A well-defined and governed EA practice is critically important at an organizational level to confront, handle and manage these technological and computing complexities. Without an EA practice, there could be disconnects between systems, inconsistencies in solutions, miscommunications among product and engineering teams, duplication of engineering efforts and erosion of an organization’s architecture and solution quality. Let us use a product startup company as an example. This startup could experience surging growth, rapidly advancing from nascent to emergent. The business and technology are experiencing brisk change. Without an EA practice, or at least some level of architecture guidance, the startup may quickly find its systems in disparity and unable to share information.

How the industry expects to secure information in a quantum world

QLabs is focusing in particular on applications in cybersecurity and communications and scooping up funding from the Australian government to help it do that at a Defence-grade level. Today, commercial exchange of information is protected primarily via public key infrastructure (PKI), with the security of PKI reliant on the computational complexity of certain mathematical operations. Sharma said that essentially, the system is reliant on mathematical problems that are easy to do one way, but difficult to reverse in order to decrypt -- and that's what cybersecurity currently relies on. One such system used for PKI exchange is an RSA algorithm. "The mathematics of the RSA key exchange will be broken once we have a quantum computer because it will be able to do the reverse calculation much faster than we can with conventional computers, even supercomputers," Sharma explained. "That's where the threat arises ... when we look forward we need to recognise that certainly within the next decade, most people would contend, that we'd have a quantum computer available at a useful scale.

The deep-learning revolution: How understanding the brain will let us supercharge AI

Sejnowski compares the neural networks of today to the early steam engines developed by the engineer James Watt at the dawn of the Industrial Age - remarkable tools that we know work but are uncertain how. "This is exactly what happened in the steam engines. 'My god, we've got this artifact that works. There must be some explanation for why it works and some way to understand it'. "There's a tremendous amount of theoretical mathematical exploration occurring to really try to understand and build a theory for a deep learning." If research into deep learning follows the same trajectory as that spurred by the steam engine, Sejnowski predicts society is at the start of journey of discovery that will prove transformative, citing how the first steam engines "attracted the attention of the physicists and mathematicians who developed a theory called thermodynamics, which then allowed them to improve the performance of the steam engine, and led to many innovative improvements that continued over the next hundred years, that led to these massive steam engines that pulled trains across the continent."

Digital Payments Security: Lessons From Canada

Canada, which has a head start on the adoption of digital payments, has learned some valuable security lessons that could be beneficial to the U.S., says Gord Jamieson of Visa. "If we look at Canada itself as a market, we're probably one of the leading countries when it comes to the adoption and usage of digital payments," says Jamieson, head of payment system risk for Visa Canada. "Seventy percent of our Canadian personal consumption expenditure is conducted using digital payments." ... "We see tokenization as basically the key to addressing fraud within this space," he says. "Tokenization is going to take that account data out of the mix. It's going to be replaced by a token - a proxy value - that today would go through the [payment] rails the same way as a normal transaction for authorization. ... And the beauty of a token is that token is unique to that environment and if it gets compromised, then you simply replace the token."

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Quote for the day:

"All leadership takes place through the communication of ideas to the minds of others." -- Charles Cooley

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