I'm a cyborg now - and so are you
Mixing sensors on our bodies, in our homes, and in our devices is bringing about an intriguing, science-fiction-like world. This isn't tomorrow, this is today, all over the developed -- and the developing -- world. As we bridge the Internet of Things and our personal area networks, we're immersed in a sea of low power radio, linking us to our machines and linking our machines to us. It's not hard to see a piece of software monitoring my wearables, letting me know that I should move. That's already a function of the Apple Watch, and anecdotes from Cupertino talk of meetings being interrupted by people getting up and walking around.
The future of Cloud computing
In order to consider the future of cloud computing, it’s important to realise that there are a number of different adoption scenarios out there. ... The older companies might also have a history of insufficient IT investment and will continue to struggle to adapt to the new technology landscape because of their legacy IT. New entrants to their markets are threatening to disrupt the establishment because of the different approach to IT and cloud use, not just because of the difference in market offerings. The following observations of the future of cloud apply to both scenarios, albeit to different extents.
IoT hype, hope give rise to new C-level position, chief IoT officer
Making room for a chief IoT officer underscores the emphasis -- and the urgency -- senior leaders are placing on the technology. "In the past, you could get to market late," Heppelmann said. Today, competition is brutal, and being late to market is not only a missed opportunity, it's a failure to understand that "data exhaust coming off of products gives you new leverage over your customer base." Worse? Businesses (and not just of the vendor variety) that aren't jumping on first-to-market IoT opportunities put themselves at risk for becoming copycats, what Heppelmann called the "me too" companies. A conservative watch-and-learn approach could create setbacks that "me too" companies can't recover from -- not the least of which is keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology.
HTTP/2 is Ready, But Are You Ready For It?
Encryption is a de facto mandate in HTTP/2 implementations at the moment because all known browser implementations from the likes of Firefox and Chrome only support HTTP/2 with TLS encryption enabled. If you are a web content provider who relies on a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce latency, you will need to share your encryption keys with your CDN providers. While some providers are comfortable doing so, many more are not. Given these various requirements, many organizations will have to weigh the benefits of HTTP/2 adoption against the costs of implementation. Do the performance improvements make it worth the steps required to support it? This calculation will probably lead many web content providers and enterprises to hold off on HTTP/2 implementation.
What You Need To Know About The CISA Bill In The U.S. Senate
CISA is yet another attempt by the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives to present legislation based on security, privacy or copyright that would regulate Internet activities. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012 would have allowed companies (like movie studios or record labels) to take down websites deemed to be infringing on copyrighted material. Opponents of SOPA said the bill provided too much leverage to media companies and the government to take down websites for even the most trivial of offenses and survey user activity. An online protest led by the likes of Reddit and Google ultimately caused the bill to fail in Congress. SOPA had a sister bill called the Protect IP Act of 2011 that also aimed to give the government and companies the ability to increase surveillance in the name of protecting copyright and fighting digital pirates.
Safe Harbor Ruling Leaves Data Center Operators in Ambiguity
“It is unrealistic to think that all transatlantic data is going to have to stop as a result of this decision,” Snead added. “The European Commission is likely to figure out a way to accommodate it, and the US is as well.” Safe Harbor, created in 2000, is a uniform set of rules for handling personal data of citizens of member states of the European Union, including rules around moving that data to facilities in the US and storing it there. If a service provider complied with the rules, they could be confident that they were not breaking any European privacy laws. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s public disclosure of the US spy agency’s covert electronic surveillance practices, however, eroded trust in Safe Harbor.
Business alignment and data analytics top CIO concerns, says SIM study
“Although alignment has received considerable attention from both academics and practitioners, it continues to remain a challenge for many organizations. It is possible that alignment remains a persistent issue due to the changing nature of business and the difficulty that the IT organization has in responding to these changes. In other words, it is one thing to become aligned, but quite another to stay aligned,” the study authors noted. Further, “Alignment of IT and/with the Business,” which has ranked in the top three for over a decade, retained the number one position it has held since 2013. Similarly, “Security/Privacy” retained the number two position that it achieved last year.
‘Response and Recovery’ Emphasized for Cyber Attacks
“So basically there are two kinds of companies: those that have been attacked and know it, and those that have been attacked and don’t know it yet.” The headlines report attacks at Target, Home Depot, Verizon and AT&T, but Joseph Bermudez, regional managing partner at Wilson Elser, said that it is not always malicious activity that causes a cyber loss. “Sometimes it is a bad act, but often it is an accident,” said, noting that regardless of the cause, “if there is a breach, your client will get a letter from their customer saying that they caused a problem and that they are owed some money. Now your client has a liability.”
The Five Qualities of Application Delivery Done Right
So if immutable infrastructure has all these benefits, why aren't all companies using it? First off, immutable infrastructure takes organizational buy-in. But even if an organization believes in the merits of immutable infrastructure, creating a system to build, deploy, maintain, and manage immutable infrastructure is not an easy task. Building images or containers is easy. Deploying and maintaining images and the provisioned hosts is challenging. However, once the build-time system is in place, it is significantly easier to manage runtime environments since there are less moving pieces. For individuals managing personal websites or companies managing small infrastructures, the investment into immutable infrastructure is probably not worth it.
Building an online game platform: Startup caters to developers
"The analytics and tools model is one of the most common ways to attract developers to gaming platforms," said Sangeet Paul Choudary, founder and CEO of Platform Thinking Labs and co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Group. He noted that the same model is used to attract brands to marketing platforms. In addition, the analytics-and-tools approach doesn't fully address what Choudary refers to as the chicken-and-egg problem of platform business models: the need to get producers and consumers on board to make a two-sided business work. "The issue is that it isn't really solving the chicken-and-egg problem as much as augmenting value once the problem gets solved, because there isn't really much value in analytics below a critical mass of usage," Choudary noted.
Quote for the day:
"Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance." -- Louis D. Brandeis
