IDG Contributor Network: 6 ways to manage your data – and team

Decision making comes with its challenges as it’s part of a process of nurturing a variety of perspectives, usually by encouraging discussion and debate. However, when competing points of view are left unmanaged, it can easily – and without warning – digress into an unhealthy conflict. Proponents are often passionate about their views and become blind to certain, inconvenient, facts.Today, data has become a reliable arbiter for such debates. This is why business intelligence (BI) has emerged as crucial to the decision making process. BI provides actionable insights that are based on numbers. A growing number of organizations are recognizing its value. In 2016, 73 percent of businesses increased their analytics capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Educating the public about security – are we doing it all wrong?

In 2016 consumers were exposed to a larger number of high profile data breaches than any year previously. According to the Breach Level Index, 1,792 data breaches led to almost 1.4 million data records being compromised worldwide, an increase of 86% compared to 2015. Identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59% of all data breaches. These numbers have helped raise public awareness around the serious threats to personal data that exist in the modern era, and awareness is also growing for some of the solutions that businesses and individuals can use to minimize the risks from data breaches. But is it enough?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Educating the public about security – are we doing it all wrong?

In 2016 consumers were exposed to a larger number of high profile data breaches than any year previously. According to the Breach Level Index, 1,792 data breaches led to almost 1.4 million data records being compromised worldwide, an increase of 86% compared to 2015. Identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59% of all data breaches. These numbers have helped raise public awareness around the serious threats to personal data that exist in the modern era, and awareness is also growing for some of the solutions that businesses and individuals can use to minimize the risks from data breaches. But is it enough?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How security executives can feel comfortable in the boardroom and server room

With information security being a major concern at all companies, successful security executives need to be equally comfortable in the boardroom and the server room. While being well-versed in traditional security duties, like developing incident response plans and knowing what technology will keep the bad guys at bay, is still essential, CISOs and CSOs also need to know how security factors into the business’ operations.Three skills that are essential for future leaders to master are being able to clearly articulate the importance of security to non-technical executives, show how security can help a company achieve its business goals and balance security with innovation. These skills are consistently mentioned by CEOs and CSOs when we’re discussing how business and security leaders can work better together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How security executives can feel comfortable in the boardroom and server room

With information security being a major concern at all companies, successful security executives need to be equally comfortable in the boardroom and the server room. While being well-versed in traditional security duties, like developing incident response plans and knowing what technology will keep the bad guys at bay, is still essential, CISOs and CSOs also need to know how security factors into the business’ operations.Three skills that are essential for future leaders to master are being able to clearly articulate the importance of security to non-technical executives, show how security can help a company achieve its business goals and balance security with innovation. These skills are consistently mentioned by CEOs and CSOs when we’re discussing how business and security leaders can work better together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How quantum computing increases cybersecurity risks

Imagine you wake up one morning, assuming everything is as you left it the night before. But overnight, attackers with a quantum computer capable of breaking current cryptography standards have targeted millions of people and stolen their personal data.Experts have estimated that a commercial quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptography we rely on today will be available by 2026. In fact, IEEE Spectrum reported last year that a quantum computer is close to cracking RSA encryption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How quantum computing increases cybersecurity risks

Imagine you wake up one morning, assuming everything is as you left it the night before. But overnight, attackers with a quantum computer capable of breaking current cryptography standards have targeted millions of people and stolen their personal data.Experts have estimated that a commercial quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptography we rely on today will be available by 2026. In fact, IEEE Spectrum reported last year that a quantum computer is close to cracking RSA encryption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Doesn’t the cloud solve all of my performance issues?

I have heard it said many times that the cloud can solve all of our performance issues. There are two reasons why this claim is not necessarily true: A misunderstanding of the difference between performance and scalability. Performance remains application-dependent. Performance versus scalability The terms performance and scalability are sometimes used interchangeably, but in actuality they have very distinct differences. The important distinction between the terms is that performance is a measure of a data point, such as the response time of a request, the amount of CPU or memory that a request needs, etc. Scalability, on the other hand, measures your application’s ability to maintain its performance as load increases. In other words, if you can service a single request in 500ms, can you service 1000 requests at 500ms each or does the response time degrade as your load increases?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Avoiding a data disaster: could your business recover from human error?

“Data.” Ask senior management at any major organization to name their most critical business asset and they’ll likely respond with that one word.As such, developing a disaster recovery strategy – both for data backup and restoration – is a central part of planning for business continuity management at any organization. It is essential that your company and the vendors you work with can protect against data loss and ensure data integrity in the event of catastrophic failure – whether from an external event or human error.Think about this: What would you do if one of your trusted database administrators made a mistake that wiped out all of your databases in one fell swoop? Could your business recover?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sponsored Post: Etleap, Pier 1, Aerospike, Loupe, Clubhouse, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, MemSQL, InMemory.Net, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

  • Pier 1 Imports is looking for an amazing Sr. Website Engineer to join our growing team!  Our customer continues to evolve the way she prefers to shop, speak to, and engage with us at Pier 1 Imports.  Driving us to innovate more ways to surprise and delight her expectations as a Premier Home and Decor retailer.  We are looking for a candidate to be another key member of a driven agile team. This person will inform and apply modern technical expertise to website site performance, development and design techniques for Pier.com. To apply please email [email protected]. More details are available here.

  • Etleap is looking for Senior Data Engineers to build the next-generation ETL solution. Data analytics teams need solid infrastructure and great ETL tools to be successful. It shouldn't take a CS degree to use big data effectively, and abstracting away the difficult parts is our mission. We use Java extensively, and distributed systems experience is a big plus! See full job description and apply here.

  • Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • DBTA Roundtable OnDemand Webinar: Leveraging Big Data with Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS. Watch this recent roundtable discussion hosted by DBTA Continue reading

IT departments should automate operations now

A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to define the term digital transformation. I didn’t want to give a long technical answer, so instead I gave the one word answer of “speed.” In the digital era, market leaders will be defined by which organization can adapt to market trends the fastest. This means the whole company must move with speed—business leaders need to make decisions fast, employees need to adapt to new processes quickly, and the IT department must make changes to the infrastructure with speed.+ Also on Network World: Automation: Disrupt or be disrupted + However, IT moving faster does not mean trying to execute the same manual processes 10 percent faster, as that would just lead to more errors. Nor does it mean throwing more people at the problem by adding to the IT staff. IT in the digital era means a complete re-think of operations with automation at the heart of the strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT departments should automate operations now

A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to define the term digital transformation. I didn’t want to give a long technical answer, so instead I gave the one word answer of “speed.” In the digital era, market leaders will be defined by which organization can adapt to market trends the fastest. This means the whole company must move with speed—business leaders need to make decisions fast, employees need to adapt to new processes quickly, and the IT department must make changes to the infrastructure with speed.+ Also on Network World: Automation: Disrupt or be disrupted + However, IT moving faster does not mean trying to execute the same manual processes 10 percent faster, as that would just lead to more errors. Nor does it mean throwing more people at the problem by adding to the IT staff. IT in the digital era means a complete re-think of operations with automation at the heart of the strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Mapping with wifi

We think of Wi-Fi as primarily bathing our homes and offices in a comfy, invisible blanket of data and internet access, but just as a blanket can take on the shapes of the bodies it covers, the microwave radiation sent out from a hotspot can be used to generate a three-dimensional image of the surrounding environment and the things and people in it. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have come up with a process that creates a holographic image of a space from the microwave radiation of a Wi-Fi signal bouncing off people and objects. The scientists say their method could be used in automated industrial settings, to track objects moving through a facility, for example. —New Atlas

The post Worth Reading: Mapping with wifi appeared first on rule 11 reader.

IDG Contributor Network: Adding an IoT dimension to the Tour de France

The Tour de France pro cycling race is one of the oldest and most prestigious annual sporting events in the world. Each year about 200 cyclists compete during most of July in a race that crosses some 2,200 miles of varied terrain in France.The first Tour de France was in 1903. Back then it attracted mostly local competitors and spectators. Coverage and prestige of the event expanded with each consecutive era of newspapers, radio, and television. However, we now live in the digital era. Fans don’t want to just watch a sport; they want to engage with it, and they expect more control and interaction.Professional sports are increasingly embracing digital technology to enhance the fan experience. This includes data-enhanced viewing, live streaming, video on demand, second-screen apps, gamification, and social media interaction. This technology is becoming a critical component of sports marketing necessary to attract fans, athletes, sponsors, and broadcasters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 things I like about my new MacBook Pro—and 5 things I don’t

If you work in the tech industry in the Bay Area, toting a MacBook Air laptop is practically a requirement. For several years now, they’ve been standard equipment for tech workers, entrepreneurs and seemingly everyone else in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.Armadas of the silvery machines, often individualized with colorful stickers for tech startups and rock bands, festoon co-working spaces and coffee shops from Santa Cruz to Petaluma. They’re light enough that techies typically carry them from meeting to meeting opened, casually dangling from a corner—it’s a wonder hundreds of them are damaged every day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers trick iris scanner to unlock Samsung Galaxy S8

When it comes to security and the iris recognition technology used in its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, Samsung touted, “The patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate, meaning iris authentication is one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private.”But the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) made a mockery of Samsung’s “virtually impossible to replicate” claims, easily defeating the iris recognition system used in the new Galaxy S8 with nothing more than a camera, a printer and a contact lens.Not only can the iris authentication system be broken to unlock an S8, the same trick could allow an attacker to access the victim’s mobile wallet. Just last week, Samsung Pay tweeted a short iris scan video ad along with, “Every eye is unique. Now you can use yours to make purchases with Samsung Pay.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

1 … 2,002 2,003 2,004 2,005 2,006 … 3,793