Indian outsourcer Infosys is hiring 10,000 American workers over the next two years, in the wake of a review of U.S. visa rules and an emphasis on local hires by the administration of President Donald Trump.Infosys said Monday it will open four new “Technology and Innovation Hubs” in the U.S., focusing on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, user experience, emerging digital technologies, cloud, and big data.The first such center is coming up in Indiana in August and is expected to create 2,000 jobs by 2021 for American workers, besides boosting the state economy.The company plans to hire both experienced technology professionals and recent graduates from major universities, and local and community colleges, besides setting up training programs in areas such as user experience, cloud, artificial intelligence, big data and digital offerings, and core technology and computer science skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2007, Michael Spears became CIO of the National Council on Compensation Insurance. It wasn't the usual promotion. Spears had spent two years as the NCCI's chief data officer, and he kept that role when be became CIO. In his dual capacity, he oversees both the IT department and the data resources division, though they operate as separate entities. Over the years, he says, the CIO and CDO roles have sometimes been held by different people and sometimes by the same person.Spears has taken some ribbing for his CIO role from his colleagues in the data analytics world. "I was just at a data conference where people were making fun of me for being in both roles. They said, 'You can't get lumped in with IT — it's just bits and bytes. You won't be respected for the knowledge you have about data.' But it doesn't have to be that way. It depends where the value is coming from, the skill sets of the leaders, and what's important to the company at that time."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Because they don’t see themselves as targets, small-to-midsize businesses (SMB) have for a long time believed that their security programs are good enough. They have a firewall, antivirus, maybe they even use two-factor authentication.The mistake is believing that this is enough because they have nothing of value to an attacker. While they may have a smaller attack surface, they are no less vulnerable than a major enterprise.Not only are small businesses growing as the favored targets for ransomware attacks, they are also the most impacted, with 60 percent shutting down within six months of a breach, according to the US National Cyber Security Alliance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Modularization is slated to be the key feature in Java SE (Standard Edition) 9, due in late July. But Java participants Red Hat and IBM have raised concerns that the base module plan could lead to incompatibilities with applications and enterprise Java.In a recent bulletin, Scott Stark, vice president of architecture for Red Hat’s JBoss group, outlined a litany of issues Red Hat and other Java Executive Committee members have with JSR (Java Specification Request) 376, pertaining to the Java Platform Modular System, a central component of the Project Jigsaw module Java effort.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It may be time for a revision of, “the customer is always right,” at least in the financial sector.That, Boston Police Detective Steven Blair told an audience of bankers at the Boston Fed’s 2017 Cybersecurity Conference on Monday, is because too many banking “customers” are fraudsters, who take advantage of the generally laudable desire of front-line employees to provide good customer service.Attendees had heard Kenneth Montgomery, first vice president and COO of the Boston Fed, say earlier that cybersecurity is now, “the number-one operational and enterprise issue” for the financial sector. He said the worldwide costs of cybercrime are estimated at $3 trillion annually now, and expected to double by 2021.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has padded its SD-WAN portfolio with fellow player Viptela for $610 million.The deal will be a homecoming for Viptela’s top execs as current CEO Praveen Akkiraju is a former Cisco and Dell EMC. Co-founders of Viptela Amir Khan and Khalid Raza were engineers at Cisco.“Cisco has been providing SD-WAN technology and services to customers for several years; the Cisco IWAN solution delivers an on-premises SD-WAN solution for customers needing advanced routing features and other advanced network services, and Cisco Meraki provides a cloud-based solution for customers needing maximum simplicity and unified threat management functionality in their SD-WAN solution. Acquiring Viptela will enable us to expand our portfolio, with increased functionality delivered through the cloud,” wrote Rob Salvagno Vice President of Corporate Business Development at Cisco wrote in a blog post on the deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're looking for curb appeal after the sun goes down, or an added element of safety along pathways, you may want to consider this deal. This stylish set of 8 landscape lights is solar powered and designed for all-weather operation. Its internal batteries charge during the day, and is completely removable and replaceable if needed (standard rechargeable AA's). The list price of $43.99 has been reduced by 43% to just $24.90 for a set of 8. And right now an additional 10% off coupon can be applied at checkout as well. See the discounted Moonrays solar landscape lights now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're looking for curb appeal after the sun goes down, or an added element of safety along pathways, you may want to consider this deal. This stylish set of 8 landscape lights is solar powered and designed for all-weather operation. Its internal batteries charge during the day, and is completely removable and replaceable if needed (standard rechargeable AA's). The list price of $43.99 has been reduced by 42% to just $25.53 for a set of 8. And right now an additional 10% off coupon can be applied at checkout as well. See the discounted Moonrays solar landscape lights now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.S. appeals court has denied a request by broadband trade groups to rehear its decision last June to uphold the Federal Communications Commission's controversial 2015 net neutrality rules.The court's decision on Monday is a hollow victory for net neutrality supporters. Just last Wednesday, new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to repeal the rules at the agency, without a court ordering him to do so.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft last week quietly acknowledged that a year-old plan to focus phone sales on the enterprise market is dead."We had no material Phone revenue this quarter," said Amy Hood, the company's CFO, during an earnings call with Wall Street on Thursday.In fact, phone revenue amounted to just $5 million for the three-month stretch, representing a massive decline of 99% from the same period of the prior year. Assuming each Windows smartphone brought $500 to Microsoft, that was a sluggish pace of just five phones sold per hour. Worldwide.It's not as if the demise of Microsoft's phone business was a surprise. The division, which was based on the 2014 acquisition of Nokia, has been in trouble with a capital "T" since 2015, when Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion, nearly the full price it paid for the Finnish company's mobile phone assets and a collection of associated patents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a blog post last September, I highlighted how data breaches for the first half of 2016 shifted from stolen credit card data and financial information to the theft of something much more personal—identities. Unsurprisingly, this trend continued throughout the remainder of the year.According to the recently released Breach Level Index, 1,792 data breaches led to almost 1.4 million data records being compromised worldwide, an increase of 86 percent compared to 2015. Once again, identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59 percent of all data breaches. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News aggregator and fan community Reddit frequently hosts an “Ask me Anything” (AMA) live discussion where people can ask questions of celebrities, technologists, politicians, and whatnot and get answers almost in real time. They can be informative and entertaining, or they can turn into unmitigated disasters.Microsoft is no doubt hoping for the former as it hosts its own AMA event to give its customers the chance to ask about the company’s plans for Windows as a Service (WaaS), its efforts to move Windows to a internet-dependent state of continuous development rather than going the old route of just providing fixes and an occasional service pack before the next major OS release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I realize that the idea of a ‘Self-driving’ WAN could seem like science fiction. But if you think of the visions propelling companies like Google, Tesla and Amazon, you can begin to realize how big an impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have in the next few years, both on our personal lives—and the way IT runs enterprises.MOVING FROM AUTOMATED TO AUTONOMOUSEnterprises are already turning to Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions to connect employees consistently and securely to applications—whether the applications are in the data center or the cloud.Automation plays a key role in these current SD-WAN offerings, eliminating many of the repetitive and mundane manual steps required to configure and connect remote offices and branch locations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Professor Dina Katabi's endlessly inventive team at MIT's CSAIL outfit has now come up with what it says is an unobtrusive way to wirelessly detect possible health issues via changes in walking speed.The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claims its WiGait system is more accurate than wearables like FitBits and smartphone-based step trackers, and they outline the technology in a new paper titled "Extracting Gait Velocity and Stride Length from Surrounding Radio Signals" to be presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The researchers claim WiGait, a wall-mounted device described as being the size of a small painting, is 95% to 99% accurate at measuring walking speeds of multiple people and requires no wearable gear on its targets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over 25 percent of the 500 companies surveyed by IDC are testing augmented reality (AR) prototypes. Much of this interest, however, is stuck in the prototype stage because most hardware platforms are prototypes and many of the tools needed to build the killer app to move into production are still under development.Vuforia adds an important piece to the AR toolchain puzzle, though, with its announcement today of Smart Terrain for Google’s Tango tablet.Smart Terrain, announced in conjunction with Google and Unity3D during the opening keynote at the Vision VR/ AR Summit, builds on two mature components of AR: Vuforia’s early experience solving a very specific AR development problem and Google Tango, which looks like the first AR platform ready to emerge from prototype status and become a mainstream platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Free is free and it’s probable that even the well-to-do of Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., would rather have a free year’s worth of Amazon Prime – retail: $99 per year – than not have a free year’s worth of Amazon Prime.But it would be difficult to find a less needy population for such a gift.Nevertheless, Amazon announced today that it is bestowing the free year – plus some free popcorn – upon the town to mark the streaming release on Prime of the Oscar-winning movie, yes, you guessed it, “Manchester-by-the-Sea.”From a press release:“Oscar winning ‘Manchester by the Sea’ is coming to Prime Video on May 5, and we wanted customers in the town to enjoy popcorn and a movie on us,” said Greg Hart, Vice President of Amazon Video, worldwide. “Manchester by the Sea is a masterpiece representing the best of cinematic storytelling. In other words, it is wicked awesome.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump is launching a special council to upgrade the U.S. government’s IT services at a time when some systems more than 50 years old. Americans deserve better digital services from their government,” the"Americans deserve better digital services from their government," said an executive order from Trump, released on Monday.The order seeks to "promote the secure, efficient and economical use" of IT. As part of that goal, Trump is establishing the American Technology Council, which he will chair.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Class of 2017 graduates in just a few weeks and will enter the IT job market, but they may be in for a rude awakening, as new iCIMS research reports that their skills and education aren't aligning with what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for in entry-level talent.The research, the Class of 2017 Job Outlook Report, which polled 401 U.S. college seniors and 401 recruiting professionals between March 6 and 17, 2017, reveals that while 91 percent of college seniors polled think they have the skills necessary to land the job they want, a whopping 98 percent of recruiters receive resumes from unqualified applicants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Robotic process automation (RPA) technology typically uses artificial intelligence to handle repetitive, rules-based, back-office tasks. And the market is about to experience a period of "explosive" growth, according to an Everest Group study.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Almost every company has data stored in its systems that is overexposed and at risk. That’s the finding of the recently released 2017 Varonis Data Risk Report. The report is based on assessments that Varonis conducts for its customers and prospects to determine which data is at risk. The report data is aggregated and anonymized.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)