Tech Bytes - Daily Digest

April 21, 2016

Why Machine Learning Is The New BI

Whether it’s IoT, big data or analytics, companies have a lot more data to base their decisions on, and data-driven decision making sounds obvious. And the next step beyond data-driven decisions is decision support systems and even automation. Are we ready for intelligent assistants with business advice? While a recent study of 50,000 American manufacturing organizations found that the use of data-driven decisions had almost tripled between 2005 and 2010, that was still only 30 percent of plants. And when telecom provider Colt surveyed senior IT leaders in Europe in 2015, 71 percent of them said intuition and personal experience works better for making decisions than using data (even though 76 percent of them say their intuition doesn’t always match the data they get).

Fintech explosion demands joint effort on oversight, report says

“There is an urgent need both for the private sector and financial supervisors to collaborate,” the group said in the report, whose contributors include investment bank executives, international economists and entrepreneurs from Asia, the U.K. and the U.S. The forum’s aim is “to foster competition between traditional financial players and new entrants while also preserving system stability,” it said. Fintech was a central theme this year at the group’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and the report draws on discussions that took place there. It incorporates views of members including executives from UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co.; tech firms such as IEX Group Inc. and On Deck Capital Inc.; and regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bank of England.

How to create a strategic analytics culture in your organization

One of the real values of utilizing data is that it can uncover questions or ideas that aren't currently being considered in your organization. A data science team will need specific tasks to accomplish, but they also need a certain degree of autonomy to explore the data and experiment with it. "If you want to build a culture, set them free," Davis said. Change is hard, especially in a large organization with many moving parts. As someone arguing for an analytics culture, you are a change agent, and you have to determine how resistant to, or accepting of, change your organization is. Try asking yourself the following questions:

Back to the future: It's all about appliances again

While that converged infrastructure move flies in the face of the promise of our server-less future, Sangster posits that the value that converged infrastructure delivers -- by taking a group of technologies that can be difficult to use on their own (much less together) and combining them into a prescriptive, pre-integrated solution -- is eternally attractive. Sangster points out that OpenStack has, until recently, been viewed as software for innovators and early adopters. This is the realm of proud DIYers blazing the trail ahead. They love to experiment, doing all the hardware and software engineering possible as they work to understand, implement and eventually deploy a new system like OpenStack. This is, of course, fun for the tinkerers, but unhelpful for the mainstream organizations that simply want to use a solution. For those folks, converged infrastructure makes sense.

The bots are coming … but they are not taking over.

The magic sauce in the march of the bots is in the deep background: the democratization and implementation of artificial intelligence systems on a large scale. Millions of software developers build interesting products and systems across the world every day. But only a handful of computer engineers know how to actually build, train and deploy advanced computing functions like machine learning, computer vision or neural networks. The companies and organizations that know how to do such things are incredibly limited: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle (to a certain extent), think tanks and university research departments like MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. The average software developer writing JavaScript Web apps probably doesn’t know the first thing about how to build artificially intelligent systems.

Is Mobile Commerce Growth Really Happening?

The shift from e-commerce to m-commerce happened quite rapidly, too rapidly for many retailers actually. Another new paradigm in 2016 is the move from shopping in mobile browsers to shopping in mobile apps. A combination of well-designed mobile apps with good UI, enhanced smartphone capabilities, push notifications, and new mobile payment tools have led to an explosion in mobile shopping. This also brought a new agenda in sales (retail) strategies for businesses to keep customers engaged and retain to come back. ... Mobile apps play a vital role in mobile commerce growth, but still struggle. 85% of mobile time is spent in apps, which is obviously stunning. On the other hand, most of the app time is solely spent in an individual’s top 3 apps. While mobile web drives double the traffic of apps across industries.

Whaling Emerges As Major Cybersecurity Threat

Vendors such as Microsoft, Proofpoint, Cloudmark and Mimecast are building tools to help companies defend against these attack. Mimecast, which makes cloud software designed to spot and quarantine phishing emails with malicious attachments and URLs, has just launched a tool designed to harpoon whaling. Called Impersonation Protect, the software's algorithms analyze the language content of emails as they come in through a corporate server. It looks for key indicators, beginning with whether the source name actually works for the company. The software will then parse the email content for requests that includes keywords and phrases such as "W2" or "wire transfer," and provides a probability score that a target email is either safe or malicious. "One indicator in isolation is not bad, but two together could be fishy," Malone says.

Dear CISOs and Legal Counsel: We Can’t Wait for the Privacy Regulators

The Issue is Clear: Why Should Anyone Trust Anyone? We could leave this issue to privacy officers, internal and external legal counsel, governments, data protection authorities, politicians, regulators, and technology companies to sort out. We could wait for the ultimate answer to solve the privacy question once and for all. And wait. And wait some more. And wait for another review, debate, newsworthy event (such as needing information from another critical terrorist phone). Or wait for the next cloud service to be hacked, exposing photos that violate an individual’s right to privacy. The reality is we just don’t trust each other—person to person or country to country. The reality is also, we have to trust each other at some level to interact personally or conduct business with each other.

Better Web Testing With Selenium

WebDriver has a few different ways to temporarily pause a script in the middle of a run. The easiest, and worst way, is an explicit wait. This is when you tell the script to hang out for some amount of time, maybe 15 seconds. Explicit waits hide real problems. A lot of the time, we see the wait fail and bump the time up a few more seconds in hopes that it will work next time. Eventually we have padded enough time in the script so that the page loads completely before trying to perform the next step. But, how long is too long? These explicit waits can conceal performance problems if we aren’t careful. The smarter way to handle waits is to base them on the specific element you want to use next. WebDriver calls these explicit waits. I have had the most luck in improving stability of a check by stacking explicit waits.

Lambda Functions versus Infrastructure - Are we Trading Apples for Oranges?

Some refer to this as stateless computing or serverless computing. Personally I prefer the second term, as there is clearly a state somewhere-probably in a database service that the function may leverage— but the function itself is essentially stateless. The same argument could be held against the serverless term, clearly there are servers floating around in the cloudy background but their existence is implicit and automatic rather than explicit and manual. The next area of value in AWS Lambda stems from the ability to easily associate your function with all manner of triggers via both web-based and command line tools. There are more than 20 different triggers that can be used—most of them being from other AWS services such as S3, Kinesis and DynamoDB.

Quote for the day:

"Problems are only opportunities in work clothes." -- Henry Kaiser,

April 20, 2016

Making the case for in-house data centers

Leasing data center capacity to another organization is another way for an internal data center to add value. “Our Texas data center has over thirty thousand square feet available which could be developed. We are exploring the possibility of leasing this capacity to another organization,” Connor says. The potential leasing arrangement would be with a single organization which would partner with BlueCross on data center design. If research and development is a priority for the organization, a specialized in house data center makes sense. In 2014, Cambridge University built the West Cambridge data center facility. The data center has delivered cost savings in the form of lower power consumption. Scientific research in chemistry, physics and other departments have increasingly decided to adopt the central data center rather than departmental resources.

European Commission formally objects to Google’s Android dominance

The EC said pre-installing and setting Google as the default, or exclusive, search service on most Android devices sold in Europe, closed off ways for rival search engines to access the market, via competing mobile browsers and operating systems. ... The EC said Google’s actions also harmed consumers by stifling competition and restricting innovation in the wider mobile space. As an example, it said Google's conduct has had a direct impact on consumers, as it has denied them access to innovative smart mobile devices based on alternative, potentially superior, versions of the Android operating system.

Leadership is more powerful than technology

One thing that's interesting is that everyone always asks, 'Well, what happened to your tech and can't you use it?' It's like, 'Well, no. ... The key is to remember always that a lot of [management] stuff comes directly from the candidates themselves. Even though, you know, Barack Obama didn't come to me and say, 'Harper, here is what you should build.' Barack Obama found people that would represent [what he wanted], and it trickled down to me. The candidate determines how software will be built, and what it will do because they choose to organize all these other things. That's how tech works. If the candidate is a terrible person, probably their technology is going to be [supported by] terrible people. That doesn't mean it's going to fail. Those are not related.

Don’t overlook SaaS, the original cloud option

There are often better SaaS alternatives -- not only cheaper, but with better capabilities and better workflows -- for internal applications. And not Salesforce alone. There are SaaS-based HR systems such as the popular Workday, as well as accounting, manufacturing, learning, project management, and even office automation. By my count, there are more than 2,000 SaaS offerings, ranging from niche applications to integrated ERP and CRM systems. Perhaps because SaaS is now 15 years old, IT has stopped thinking about it as cloud -- they confine the term's use to newer offerings like IaaS and PaaS. But SaaS is the original cloud, and it represents the largest part of the cloud market.

Brexit won’t exempt you from new EU data protection obligations

In the long term, the economic argument for the UK adopting the GDPR if we leave – or, indeed, implementing even more stringent measures that would satisfy the Regulation’s data protection requirements – is strong: according to the Office for National Statistics, e-commerce accounted for 20% of UK business turnover in 2014. And, as think tank Chatham House pointed out only last month, “data sharing has an impact on all business with the EU (both online and offline), valued at 45 per cent of UK exports and 53 per cent of UK imports.” In still-straitened economic times, that value is obviously something the Exchequer will be keen preserve.

How compliance can be an excuse to shun the cloud

"When you break down the problem it only governs a specific piece or component of data and only those apps," he says. "They aren't breaking down the problem and laying out the workloads and data sets." As it turns out, the excuses for not embracing the cloud are numerous. One cause is generational. People have been running internal data centers for decades. Good luck convincing a CIO in his or her 50s who fears being cut out of a job in the first place that data and applications should be moved off-site into a data center somewhere across the country. ... The problem is also dependent on the size of the company. Small firms without a dedicated IT staff can be more reticent because they don't have someone who is fully dedicated to understanding computing services and products, said James Gast

Next up in smart devices: The Internet of shirts and shoes

IoT startup Evrythng is teaming up with packaging company Avery Dennison to give apparel and footwear products unique identities in Evrythng’s software right when they’re manufactured. The companies have high hopes for the Janela Smart Products Platform, seeing a potential to reach 10 billion products in the next three years. The system could put a simple form of IoT into the hands of millions of consumers who weren’t even shopping for technology. Evrythng and Avery Dennison don’t want to make your clothes into online celebrities, they want to make them more useful. What they’re doing may make it harder to counterfeit desirable products and commit fraud at the returns counter. There could be some fun features for consumers, too.

Free Up IT Infrastructure Costs to Fund Transformation

Though few near-term opportunities for savings may be apparent, I&O provides plenty of longer-term room if you‘re willing to address cost optimization with careful scrutiny of every asset. “The most important thing is to make sure you have a strategy in place,” said Ms. Caminos. “Then you can look at cost savings, starting with some areas that will give you some quick wins depending on your existing environment.” Consider each of the four major technology domains that make up I&O: data centre, networking, client computing and service desk. Then evaluate the most impactful methods for reducing costs and prioritise your initiatives. It’s important to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) for each of these functional areas.

Insurance Giant John Hancock Begins Blockchain Tech Tests

While the company isn’t sharing details around its proofs-of-concept, earlier this year ‘Big Four’ accounting firm Ernst & Young published a report listing peer-to-peer insurance and faster distribution of “regionalized or personalized” products among its list of opportunities for insurers using blockchain. Other possible applications according to the report include fraud detection through creating a decentralized repository of customer information and policies; digital claims management through providing historical third-party transaction data; types of distribution using micro-insurance and micro-finance; and new kinds of products around "cyber liability" for security professionals. But, not all considerations mentioned in the report were positive.

Companies high on virtualization despite fears of security breaches

Adding to the confusion, virtualization has caused a shift in IT responsibilities in many organizations, says Greg Young, research vice president at Gartner. The data center usually includes teams trained in network and server ops, but virtualization projects are typically being led by the server team. “The network security issues are things they haven’t had to deal with before,” Young says. The average cost to remediate a data breach in a virtualized environment tops $800,000, according to Kapersky Labs, and remediation costs bring the average closer to $1 million – nearly double the cost of a physical infrastructure attack. Companies don’t see technology as the sole answer to these security problems just yet, according to the HyTrust survey.

Quote for the day:

"Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind." -- Walter Landor

April 12, 2016

The Future of Economics May Be in the Hands of Machine Learning

Historically, the discipline of economics has always been categorized among the social sciences, which means the word ‘science’ should be understood as somewhat loosely applied. Unlike the natural sciences, which are prescribed as strictly positivist and bound by the ideals of empirical truth to only build theories around quantitative data that can be measured and duplicated, social sciences are often influenced by observations that are open to interpretation. In social sciences, research models can be eclectic, built from combination of qualitative and quantitative data. And conclusions drawn from models like that are prone to the influence of bias and personal ideologies. Not that hard sciences can’t also be prone to bias and ideology. It’s just that the whole point of the strict empirical research model is to limit the potential for bias and interpretive ambiguity.

Collaboration Technology Fuels Innovation for States and Localities

Collaboration forms the cornerstone of the innovative work conducted at the North Carolina Innovation Center, which is run by the state’s Department of Information Technology (DIT). The iCenter both showcases collaborative workspace options and technologies and puts them to work helping the departments the DIT serves. “When Governor Pat McCrory first envisioned the iCenter, it was primarily about creating a culture of collaboration throughout the state to better serve citizens,” says North Carolina CIO Keith Werner. The agency has been fortunate to work with partners to demo equipment and furniture without burdening taxpayers, he adds. Determined to run lean, DIT took advantage of existing resources on both the personnel and the facility side.

From tech supplier to IT service provider, a CIO makes the 'big switch'

"IT is not just an enabler of certain processes but part of the delivery of every product and service we offer," Watkins said. Indeed, the company itself was undergoing a transformation, Watkins said. KAR no longer wanted to be a car auction company that uses technology but "a technology company that sells cars," he said. IT had not kept up with the vision. "With the convergence of these technologies, business demand skyrocketed and created a wide gap between business expectations and IT delivery. Something had to switch," Watkins said. ... "We need our staff to be agents of change. The status quo doesn't get it done. We have to look at things differently. We have to be problem solvers. We have to bridge siloes between IT and operations, between one IT team and another IT team, and between being a technology provider and being a service organization," he said.

Windows XP still powers 181 million PCs two years after support ends

Even though Microsoft retired Windows XP two years ago, an estimated 181 million PCs around the world ran the crippled operating system last month, according to data from a web metrics vendor. Windows XP exited public support on April 8, 2014, amid some panic on the part of corporations that had not yet purged their environments of the 2001 OS. Unless companies paid for custom support, their PCs running XP received no security updates after that date. Consumers were completely cut off from patches, with no alternatives other than to switch to a newer operating system or continue running an insecure machine. But two years after XP’s support demise, nearly 11% of all personal computers continue to run the OS, data for March from U.S.-based analytics vendor Net Applications showed.

The digital effect on the BPM lifecycle

The shift from traditional to digital business goes well beyond incremental improvement. In metaphorical terms, moving from the railroad to the automobile would be incremental change; the transition from traditional to digital business would be more like moving from the automobile to the space shuttle, i.e. whole new game, new players, new rules, new stakeholders, and importantly, new risks and new rewards. ... It is a marvelous instantiation of the chicken and the egg: does the business enable the technology or does the technology enable the business? I will, for now, be comfortable with the simple answer: YES. Let the philosophers amongst us continue to impress their cocktail party friends with the more verbose answers and profound wisdom that can only be found in the third glass of wine.

DataStax believes multi-model databases are the future

DataStax added to its own multi-model capabilities with the announcement of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) Graph, a scaled-out graph database built for cloud applications that need to manage highly connected data. Graph databases are a specialized form of NoSQL database intended to address relational data, but in a much more efficient and scale-out manner. "Graph is an excellent method of evaluating, expressing and analyzing previously unrecognized relationships in data," Gartner's Heudecker and fellow analyst Mark Beyer wrote in their July 2015 report, Making Big Data Normal with Graph Analytics. "Instead of examining and analyzing data as a set of discrete and unrelated atomic elements, graph allows for the exploration of the frequency, strength and direction of relationships in data."

Security researchers defeat reCAPTCHA

The system uses techniques to bypass CAPTCHA security measures such as tokens and cookies as well as machine learning to correctly guess images presented to it. The researchers said the system they had devised was “extremely effective”, automatically solving 70.78 percent of the image reCaptcha challenges, while requiring only 19 seconds per challenge. The trio also applied this attack to the Facebook image captcha and achieved an accuracy of 83.5 percent. The researchers said that the enhanced accuracy of the attack system on Facebook's security was down to the higher-resolution images it used. Google's lower resolution images make it difficult for the automated system to classify images.

Top 5 misconceptions about Big Data

The business opportunities for big data can be significant. One of the more straightforward examples which didn’t involve any exotic new practices or people is Guess Inc. They were able to re-engineer their data pipeline to completely transform the experience of managing their retail stores. In the old world the store managers had a weekly printed report. In the new world they have real-time, dynamic information about their store, their customers, and brand & loyalty programs. So Guess was able to overhaul the process of decision-making. If they’d just focused on doing more of the same, this wouldn’t have happened. ... Some organizations are large enough to bear the cost of being Hadoop experts. Many aren’t. And the degree of expertise required for the care and feeding of Hadoop is highly dependent on how it’s being used.

Why Solving Problems Always Leads to More Problems, and How to Stop the Madness

A problem, once solved, merely restores the status quo. Solving it gets you back to where you were before the problem arose, but brings no lasting difference to the situation. A staff member quits, we recruit a new one, and now we're right back where we were. The customer gets angry, we send them flowers and give them a credit, and we're back on an even keel with them. But nothing has changed. An obstacle, when solved, measurably changes the situation, or even the business as a whole; things are never the same again after we solve it. And because we solved the obstacle, it dramatically reduces the number of problems we will have going forward. That's one way you know you're solving obstacles, because the number of related problems are permanently reduced.

Claire Agutter on IT Service Management and Future Practices

ITSM is defined as an organization’s capabilities to deliver IT services that support the business. It can include people, processes, tools, suppliers…pretty much anything that makes up an IT service. For example, think about your own organization without email, remote working, printing etc. How would it look? IT service management has been developing as long as IT and technology itself. Because IT services support business processes, they need to be dependable, reliable and do the job they are meant to do. If IT is failing, the business suffers. Not many businesses can cope with paper and pens now. Many organizations realized quickly that IT needed to be governed for them to get value.

Quote for the day:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal." -- Henry Ford

April 11, 2016

The truth comes out: Microsoft needs Linux

The juggernaut has finally realized where the future lies...and it is not in the desktop platform. The future is the cloud, SaaS, and virtualization. The future is big data, and massive databases. The future is Linux and Microsoft knows this. This isn't the 90s or early 2000s when it was chic to look down on the underdog and laugh as the powerhouse raked in cash like leaves on a Midwestern autumn lawn. The time for spreading Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is over. This is now and now is all about open source. Microsoft fully understands and embraces this. And so they are bringing to Windows the tools they need to make it happen. This move isn't so much about Linux, but about Microsoft.

Get Data to the Client and Save Server-Side Storage

The normal processing cycle for an ASP.NET MVC is to retrieve some data in the Controller, move it into a Model object, and then pass that data to a View to be embedded into some HTML. It's not unusual, however, for there to be some data in that mix that shouldn't be displayed to the user but that you still need on the client (often in to pass in calls to a Web Service). It's also not unusual for some of that data not to be needed on the client at all, but is required back on the server when the user's input is posted back from the browser after the user is done. There are a couple of ways to handle that "non-displayed" data. For the data required on the client (but not shown to the user) a common solution is to shove it into HTML hidden tags in the View

Why cloud, mobile and the education sector make a perfect match

While giving students hands-on experience of modern technology is important from a development perspective, the expectations of digitally native learners means education institutions must deploy the right solutions now in order to stay relevant. As competition to recruit students increases, academies and universities in particular are turning to technology to differentiate. As a starting point, with today’s students used to consuming online services through a range of different devices, there is a growing expectation for schools and universities to deliver their resources in a similar way. While the majority of universities have provided course materials online for some time, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Can Public Cloud Truly Meet The Data Demands Of Enterprises?

“In the last year, cloud has gone from being the untrusted option to being seen as a more secure option for many companies,” said Brian Stevens, vice president of product management for Google Cloud Platform. “We know that compliance, support and integration with existing IT investments is critical for businesses trying to use public cloud services to accelerate into new markets.” Then we have Oracle, who unlike Google, is at the other end of the stick. Oracle has been successful in the enterprise world for decades now, and has to prove to customers there’s no need to leave when it comes to cloud migration, because it also has attractive cloud offerings that can suit enterprises. Oracle’s offering comes in the form of Oracle Cloud Machine’s Cloud at Customer.

4 Ways to Close the Communication Gap and Get Your Data Seen

The integration of data science into an organization is a relatively new development that involves new personalities, skills, processes, technologies, and their related investments, so it's bound to cause some level of disruption. Executive leadership may lack a clear understanding — and perhaps even respect — for the role of data science. Likely, these leaders simply haven't had a chance to get caught up. Moreover, while the idea that no computer is ever going to beat a sharp manager's instincts that were honed over many years in the same industry contains some truth, human bias sometimes prevents leaders from making evidence-based decisions that will benefit the company. Both new terminology and a low comfort level with the relevant technology may contribute to the communication gap as well.

Three ITSM Activities to Amplify DevOps Feedback Loops

When organizations are split into silos it’s common for each silo to have its own KPIs; with the differences between these KPIs being the cracks in the floor for things to fall into. This issue can be measured by incidents that are not repaired, technical debt incurred, and a pile up of work in progress. At the enterprise company, which I’ve been talking about, the Operations team had different KPI targets for Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) compared to the Development team ... Changing how people work resulted in improvements in how incidents are resolved. Instead of “duct taping” a patch onto an application or server, the fix is built into the design at the front of the workflow, therefore avoiding future occurrences.

Are your vendors leaving you vulnerable?

Research reveals that on average 89 third-party vendors access a typical company’s network each week, and that number is likely to grow. Three quarters (75 percent) of those polled stated the number of third-party vendors used by their organization has increased in the last two years, and 71 percent believe the numbers will continue to increase in the next two years. The report uncovered a high level of trust in third-party vendors, but a low level of visibility of vendor access to IT systems. 92 percent of respondents say they trust vendors completely or most of the time, although two-thirds (67 percent) admit they tend to trust vendors too much. Astonishingly, only 34 percent knew the number of log-ins to their network attributed to third-party vendors, and 69 percent admitted they had definitely or possibly suffered a security breach resulting from vendor access in the past year.

Reflections on the 2016 external audit season

The more expectations are defined (for our purposes – documented) the less audit issues you will have. The reason is that most technology and information security functions generally excel at implementing agreed upon requirements. These requirements are generally documented through policy. The problem arises when expectations are not communicated, agreed to and thereby documented. In these situations, the external auditor may impose their own expectations resulting in comments requiring that their expectations be implemented whether reasonable or not. So, resolve your issues within your function and other departments before the audit or the external auditor will resolve it for you.

How to apply Agile practices with your non-tech team or business

"A recruiting team can't predict candidate outcomes," says Kammersell. "Recruiting can have a pretty standard process flow from start to finish. However, there are factors on a daily basis that can rapidly change the flow." Because of the irregular nature of recruiting, the team needed to be flexible and efficient, while also maintaining transparency among their team and stakeholders. If they weren't, a recruiter might get bogged down in the workflow, causing candidates to drop out, managers to become impatient, or the cost-to-hire to rise significantly. So, Kammersell worked with the team to use the Kanban board practice of the Kanban Agile framework. The team displayed the work they had on their plate on a public, physical board for the team and other stakeholders to see.

22 insults no developer wants to hear

Some people are explicitly rough, and part of that might be the mechanisms by which we receive insults -- almost never face to face. Linus Torvalds argues that email is an inherently flawed mechanism that often hides subtle cues, like the ones that the marketing department swaps by moving their eyes. Torvalds once told a thin-skinned developer, “it's damn hard to read people over email. I think you need to be *more* honest and *more* open over email.” For a bit of fun, he inserted a logic bomb into the calls for more sensitivity by saying that his culture includes cursing. Whiners might try remembering that he comes from Scandinavia, the home of Viking warriors. In the interest of helping the technology world cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, here is a list of some common insults that no developer wants to hear -- but often will. Brace yourself.

Quote for the day:

"Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is the best teacher." -- John Maxwell

April 10, 2016

U.S. Senate Bill Seeks to Ban Effective Encryption, Making Security Illegal

This bill essentially says you can not have any conversation or data exchange that the government can not access if it wants to. It is the legal culmination of what the FBI has been lobbying Congress for years. If Feinstein-Burr becomes law, it will be illegal to deploy strong encryption without key escrow maintained by each company. Cryptographers and computer scientists near-unanimously assert key backup systems are insecure at scale. The first read of the bill is chilling. Strong cryptography within the United States would effectively be banned, preventing U.S. companies from building secure software. These companies would be mandated to provide real technical assistance. Unlike the best effort of today, they would be required to give plain-text data in its original format or risk penalties for violating the law.

Security and employee privacy biggest barriers to BYOD

The biggest inhibitors to BYOD adoption, according to respondents, are, unsurprisingly, security (39 per cent) and employee privacy (12 per cent). In contrast, management opposition (3 per cent), employees’ unwillingness to take on additional expenses (6 per cent), and user experience concerns (4 per cent) were not considered significant barriers to BYOD adoption. When it comes to security, data leakage/loss was cited as the top BYOD security concern by 72 per cent of respondents. Meanwhile, 56 per cent are worried about unauthorized access to company data and systems, and 54 per cent are concerned that users will download unsafe apps or content. One in five organizations have suffered a mobile security breach, primarily driven by malware and malicious WiFi, with security threats to BYOD imposing heavy burdens on organizations’ IT resources (35 per cent) and help desk workloads (27 per cent).

Phishing email that knows your address

"The email has good spelling and grammar and my exact home address...when I say exact I mean, not the way my address is written by those autofill sections on web pages, but the way I write my address. "My tummy did a bit of a somersault when I read that, because I wondered who on earth I could owe £800 to and what was about to land on my doormat." She quickly realised it was a scam and did not click on the link. "Then, a couple of minutes later, You and Yours producer Jon Douglas piped up as he'd received one and then another colleague said he'd received one too, but to his home email address," she added. The You and Yours team decided to contact the companies that were listed in the emails as being owed money. A spokesman for British Millerain Co Ltd, a waxed cotton fabric manufacturer, told the programme that the firm "had more than 150 calls from people who don't owe us money".

Cryptocurrency from the Dark Web to the Mainstream

Bitcoin has the added benefit of greater speed and efficiency in facilitating payments and transfers. The blockchain technology also serves as a powerful and detailed ledger that can monitor all transactions in the network. However, these benefits don’t detract from bitcoin’s indisputable flaws, which were on display in 2013 when Tokyo-based Mt Gox collapsed, wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars in client funds. Claims of bitcoin’s potential also don’t ignore the cryptocurrency’s role in facilitating online criminal behaviour, money laundering, tax evasion and fraud. ... In reality, bitcoin is just one version of the digital currency revolution. While it may be the largest, it isn’t necessarily the best. However, what these and other critics seem to forget is that the virtual currency paradigm does not live and die with bitcoin.

How to Transition Industry Toward Software-Based Infrastructure & Hybrid Clouds

A very important area of focus is network security. As we move toward a software-defined world, security is lagging behind. ONUG’s Software-Defined Security Services Working Group focuses on how to secure the software infrastructure to ensure users have access to the same level of security or better as they move from the physical to the software world. This working group is organizing a framework for software-defined security services that defines what security means in a software-defined world, both from an exploit mitigation point of view and from a compliance point of view. The group will present the framework at the ONUG Spring Conference.

Do IT groups really need to move to a software-defined environment?

Increasingly, the main motivations for moving to a software-defined world are the benefits of speed, agility, quality and cost. It enables bringing on applications quickly. With agility comes scalability to quickly grow services and infrastructure to the business needs – or shrink them. This increased speed and agility paradoxically do not come at the expense of quality. In fact, where we have been able to study software-defined environments, we find them operating at much higher quality levels. ... Finally, software-defined environments are far cheaper to operate and maintain. It is easy to understand that fewer people equals less cost, and less rework due to higher quality saves money. However, this is just the start.

Economics of Software Resiliency

Obviously, the resilience comes with a cost and the economies of benefit should be seen before deciding on what level of resilience is required. There is a need to balance the cost and effectiveness of the recovery or resilience capabilities against the events that cause disruption or downtime. These costs may be reduced or rather optimized if the expectation of failure or compromise is lowered through preventative measures, deterrence, or avoidance. There is a trade-off between protective measures and investments in survivability, i.e., the cost of preventing the event versus recovering from the event. Another key factor that influences this decision is that cost of such event if it occurs.

Duties, Skills, & Knowledge of a Software Architect

The knowledge requirement is so staggering and extensive that there are very few persons capable of performing in an above average capacity. I cannot envision how one could possibly through strictly academic coursework, acquire this knowledge without perilous and untiring pursuit. ... Appreciate the value of the contributions they can make , especially not in the short run, but over time. Build a recognition that architecture is vital to the life cycle of the information, does not exist solely to serve the application, and may well surpass several generations of application development. Recognize that like building a solid bridge, the value is not in how quickly and cheaply it can be built, but how ultimately useful, flexible, and durable it is over it's expected life.

Managing Operational Resilience

Operational resilience management draws from several complex and evolving disciplines, including risk management, business continuity, disaster recovery, information security, incident and emergency management, information technology (IT), service delivery, workforce management, and supply-chain management, each with its own terminology, principles, and solutions. The practices described here reflect the convergence of these distinct, often siloed disciplines. As resilience management becomes an increasingly relevant and critical attribute of their missions, organizations should strive for a deeper coordination and integration of its constituent activities.

Creating an Enterprise Architecture to Engage with “Things”

“Economic agents are more than just people and businesses — imagine an economic agent in the role of a customer that is actually an Internet-connected thing,” said Don Scheibenreif, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Whether it’s a refrigerator ordering a replacement water filter, a car scheduling a service appointment or an industrial machine requesting maintenance, the idea is that as the number and capability of Internet-connected things increases, they will develop the capacity to buy, sell, and negotiate for products and services, with organizations having to adapt to this new reality.”

Quote for the day:

"The old mantra of ‘be everywhere’ will quickly be replaced with ‘be where it matters to our business'." -- Mike Stelzner

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