When it comes to the smart home, big names like Nest and Dropcam have gotten most of the attention due to their product success and lucrative acquisition figures. But as impressive as these products have been, there are a multitude of other unknown products ranging from door locks to basic thermostats that require connectivity and…

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By Stephen Midgley, Vice President of Global Marketing, Absolute Software

The recent iCloud hack and subsequent leak of intimate photos of Hollywood celebrities has made it clear that even the rich and famous aren’t immune to data loss. The fatal mistake these stars made was to forget that data, be it an email or photo, isn’t static. More often than not it goes straight to the cloud, where in theory it can be accessed from anywhere.

What’s happened to the stars of the screen is exactly what’s happened to countless businesses and high profile individuals over the years. Clearly, there is still some progress to be made when it comes to protecting sensitive data within the cloud. But what other high profile sectors are in danger of suffering a similar fate to Jennifer Lawrence, and how can they protect themselves in the future?

• The Vatican – The Pope set up the Vatican G8 group to look at ways to reform the Holy See’s administration, including governance and finances. However, given the Vatican’s global recognition, it could be an obvious target for hackers. Even the Vatican uses the internet and the cloud, so you have to hope these reforms will include data protection policies.

• Whitehall – Not a stranger to lost files and data leaks, but with an election coming up, maybe all the parties need to take a closer look at safeguarding data. Do the parties’ technology manifestoes need a stronger focus on endpoint security and data management?

• FIFA – The global football association’s reputation has never been worse, yet an ill-timed data leak could cause even more damage. With four years to go until Russia 2018, FIFA’s got a couple of years to show its data protection policies are whiter than white.

• Passport Office – Given the misery experienced by travellers over the summer due to delays with their passport applications, a data breach would further darken the Passport Office’s current reputation.  Of course, even a small breach would cause massive amounts of damage when you think about the type of data the organisation holds.

While it’s impossible to completely protect against data breaches, there are a few things that people and organisations can do to significantly reduce the risks. While these tips might be more suited to businesses, there’s a lot that Hollywood’s stars could learn too.

1.      Policy – What are you allowed to do with your work-enabled mobile phone/laptop/tablet? If you don’t make this clear to your employees they’ll always assume there are no restrictions. This could lead to selfies, dangerous applications and leaked files entering and leaving the device.

2.      Education – Often, data leaks happen because people aren’t aware of the risks. Staff need educating about the consequences of their actions on themselves and the wider company.

3.      Technology – Passwords aren’t enough to stop data leaking. Technology, ranging from two-factor authentication to device management and tracking, acts as a safeguard in case the policy and education fails.

Hopefully the iCloud data breach story will act as a cautionary tale as to the dangers of assuming the cloud is a safe environment. No matter what the device or the user, understanding the importance of policy, education and technology is fundamental to securing yourself against data leaks and ensuring your personal data doesn’t make it out into the wider world.

Picture credit: Marcus Vegas

IBM has launched Watson Analytics, offering what is claimed as instant access to powerful big data visualisation and analytics capabilities to anyone in the business.

Instead of using programming languages or complex algorithms on the front end, Watson interacts with the user in natural language and comprehends key questions, including ‘What are the key drivers of my product sales?’, ‘Which benefits drive employee retention the most?’ and ‘Which deals are most likely to close?’

“Watson Analytics produces results that explain why things happened and what’s likely to happen, all in familiar business terms,” a press release explains. “And as business professionals interact with the results, they can continuously fine tune questions to get to the heart of the matter.”

A freemium version of the service is being mooted, running off the cloud and on to desktop and mobile devices. Users can input a certain amount of data for free before the collection plate is shoved under their nose – and it’s not being restricted to IBM customers, either.

“You don’t have to be an existing customer of IBM to use Watson Analytics,” Gene Villeneuve, European predictive & business intelligence sales and brand leader at IBM, told CloudTech. “We’re not constraining it by any existing customer commitments or relationship with IBM.

“Our target is to target any line of business user across large, medium, and small organisations, who want to be able to benefit from this great new capability,” he added. “We really want the whole world to be able to bask in this.”

That last quote tells you plenty about how proud IBM is of this release. Villeneuve said  in dispatches this was a ‘big day’ for the 102 year old company. A press release calls it the ‘biggest announcement in a decade as leader in analytics’. Oliver Oursin, global predictive and business intelligence solutions, told CloudTech it was a ‘breakthrough’.

Watson has lived a varied and interesting life having come to attention through beating Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings. Having been utilised in medical diagnosis to great success in the past, Watson’s capability is finding a new home – or, at least a home that’s been refurbished.

Technologies such as this, with lots of fanfare but a relatively nomadic existence – SAP’s HANA database comes to mind – could be criticised as being a ‘solution looking for a problem’. Watson Analytics blows that out of the water, according to Villeneuve.

“For us, what we’re doing with Watson Analytics is very pertinent to a market problem out there,” he said, adding: “It’s hard for the average person to be able to really fully grasp the benefit and power of the average BI product, because the products don’t necessarily guide them, or make sure that they use the right way of visualising…for representing and telling the story around data.

“Many of the tools today on the market start you off with a blank screen,” he continued. “The average business person has normal, everyday questions. Show me sales, show me top 10, show me bottom 10, show me contributions, show me growth.

“We’ve built it so it has the ability to have that natural language dialogue – and because we’ve been partnering with customers all along, we’ve got lots of customer validation [and] lots of customer input.”

IBM is currently accepting applications for Watson Analytics beta, which is expected to go live later in Q4. You can sign up here.

It’s time to condense all I’ve seen, heard, and learned about the IoT into a fun, easy-to-remember guide. Without further ado, here are Five (5) Things About the Internet of Things: 1. It’s the end-state of Moore’s Law.
It’s easy enough to debunk the IoT as “nothing new.” After all, we’ve have embedded systems for years. We’ve had devices connected to the Internet for decades; the very definition of a network means things are connected to it. But now that the invariable, self-fulfilling prophecy of Moore’s Law has resulted in a rise from about 10,000 transistors on a chip in 1980 to more than 2.5 billion today, our systems are powerful enough and fast enough to deliver long-imagined dreams.

There simply was not enough bandwidth even a decade ago to the dataflows from tens of billions of sensors, billions of phones and tablets, and tens of millions of enterprises. Systems were not powerful enough to process such large amounts of data, nor could they handle software sophisticated enough to make sense of it all.

Now, everything is up to speed. Moore’s Law will continue, future systems will continue to make past systems look quaint and comical. But the paradigm will shift no more. The Internet of Things is the culmination of processing power, smart devices, and ubiquitous networking we’ve been talking about for a long time.

2. It’s not going away.
As the IoT is a culimination of great ideas and steady technological advance, it’s not a fad, flash in the pan, or trend. Just as the Worldwide Web upped the ante significantly on the software side for what we expect from the Internet, the IoT does so on the hardware side.

The IoT is as permanent as the Web. Its current lack of standards guarantee it, because the IoT does not have a single way of expressing itself. The welter of protocols and architectures constitute it today will simply over time, then re-complicate, then repeat. (Look at the history of PC standards battles as an example. Just as one issue gets settled, another springs up.)

The IoT’s capabilities will expand as human innovation continues to think of new and creative ways to use its tools. It’s here to stay.

3. It’s bigger than a breadbox
Just as it’s hard for the human mind to literally imagine a time period of, say, 250 million years, let alone a distance of 250 million light-years, it’s hard to get a grip on, say, 250 million terabytes.

Yet even that figure – also expressed as 250 exabytes – is only about 25% of the amount of global IP traffic expected in 2015. It’s a small fraction of expected traffic a decade from now.

I and many others have written about the challenge of building enough systems and storage to handle this amount of traffic. The figure runs into the trillions of dollars today – but given that storage costs, for example, have dropped by a factor of one million over the past 25 years, we can expect similar mind-boggling progress in the future. As I said, it’s not going away.

4. It’s about people, not breadboxes and refrigerators
One seemingly irresistable human tendency is to take the most ridiculous aspect of something and use it to ridicule the entire idea. So, if you don’t like baseball, show fat guys in uniforms and players spitting. Don’t like California? Bring up tired cliches about lifestyles and talk about earthquakes. Skeptical of this Internet thingy? Breathlessly report about how people commit crimes with it.

With the IoT, the smart refrigerator serves as the all-purpose whipping boy. Why do I need my fridge to tell me I’m running low on eggs? Why, great-grandma knew that just by looking in there, and she kept things plenty of cold in those days when the iceman really did cometh. What if the refrigerator turns into HAL on me and opens my garage door, turns up my thermostat, or tries to burn the house down by shorting something out? I’m sure not gonna pay thousands of dollars on such nonsense.

The creation of smart breadboxes (if there is such a thing anymore), toasters, and refrigerators will proceed apace, either accepted by the market or not. Meanwhile, wearables will move beyond Google Glass to less intrusive, less annoying, more useful devices. Sensors in shirts from Ralph Lauren for professional tennis players are in the news currently. Beacons on belts, beacons on watches, beacons on beacons will impact shopping, pedestrian flow, and security.

Meanwhile, vast industries such as manufacturing, health care, and transportation will become more adept, more efficient, and more widespread. Smart buildings, grids, cities, and nations will be ever more in the news.

But all of this wondrous IoT will be under the control of people. If you don’t want a smart appliance, don’t buy one. If you want your business to be in a smart building, rent there. Whether or not you want your tax dollars to go to smart infrastructure, support your position.

If the IoT was determined by the ultimate end-state of Moore’s Law, then the ultimate end-state of the IoT will be determined by people.

5. It could be the worst idea ever.
Because of #4, the IoT could be the worst idea ever. Human beings have a knack for creating great works of art and launching things to the stars, while failing to act civilized on the most basic level.

Many of the brilliant scientists involved in creating the first atomic bomb feared for what powerful people would do with it. To date, this technology’s satanic power has not been unleashed on humankind since its first and only uses, but the analog hands of the nuclear clock are still poised very close to high noon.

The IoT carries with it similar intoxicating, dangerous power. Recent years have shown the pervasiveness of focused domestic spying in the US (and presumably elsewhere), in the name of security. The IoT only puts more powerful tools into the hands of those who would control entire populations in the name of societal good.

If I had the time and talent, I’d write a dystopic novel about a world in the not-distant future in which embedded subcutaneous sensors now run our lives, controlled by megalomaniacs and morons near and far. The movie “Idiocracy” gives us an idea of this world. What if this film turns out to be optimistic?

Yet, as I said, the IoT is not going away. So let’s make the best of it.

Let’s work to solve humanity’s big problems, overcome resignation and cynicism about our leaders, and take the time now and then to enjoy a nicely cooled beverage from a smart bottle stored in a smart refrigerator delivered to us from a smart company by a “smart drone” (oxymoron alert) that flies in a smart city’s smart grid in this IoT that we’ve created.

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The Internet of Things promises to transform businesses (and lives), but navigating the business and technical path to success can be difficult to understand.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Sean Lorenz, Technical Product Manager for Xively at LogMeIn, will show you how to approach creating broadly successful connected customer solutions using real world business transformation studies including New England BioLabs and more.

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Yahoo CIO Mike D. Kail will present a session on DevOps at the 3rd International DevOps Summit, November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Mike brings more than 23 years of IT operations experience with a focus on highly scalable architectures to Yahoo. Prior to Yahoo, he served as VP of IT Operations at Netflix. The Netflix culture highlighted the transformation we see within forward-thinking IT organizations today and its use of public cloud and ‘No Ops’ is well known in the industry. Mike Kail worked to develop this culture within Netflix’s own IT organization, where he focused not only on the technology, but also on hiring and training the right talent. In order to achieve the right mix of technology innovation and human talent, he concentrated on identifying the right mind set for a new way of IT (DevOps) and how to transition from IT Ops to DevOps

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Managed service provider Easynet has launched a new European cloud portfolio, featuring a “hybrid by design” format in response to customer demand.

The new solution avoids vendor lock-in by offering customers the opportunity to select the most appropriate cloud solution for their requirements, and offers a 99.99% SLA.

Philip Grannum, managing director of cloud, hosting and UC services at Easynet, told CloudTech that even though customers felt the need to switch between vendors as and when, they still needed to buy in to Easynet’s ethos.

“The key to our customers is that they see the benefits of moving to an organisation such as Easynet, and most of that is due to the extra service they get over and above the technology per se,” he said.

“But they also see the benefits of working with the likes of Amazon and Azure – Azure seems to be very compelling right now with our customers – and what they’re looking for is a solution that enables them to do both.”

Easynet describes its ‘hybrid by design’ cloud as a series of multiple public cloud offerings integrated with the Easynet Enterprise cloud. Grannum sees the trend of organisations using a mix of on-premise and cloud as “only going in one direction.”

“I think the market will move towards SaaS providers, but where it is mission critical and business critical, customers will want to have the ability to know that it’s housed in the UK, or housed in France, or Amsterdam,” said Grannum.

“They want to mix and match their key applications with the right cloud for them. Sometimes that’s going to be an on-premise solution if they want really high performance from a database point of view, and other times it’ll be using an enterprise cloud like us,” he added.

Easynet’s 99.99% SLA for single site enterprise cloud services – described as “unique in the European market” according to the press bumf – seems a fair reflection on the possibilities of downtime.

The service hasn’t gone down yet, but Grannum feels the 100% SLA claim is “misleading.”

“From an engineering point of view, I like to stick with that as a base principle,” he said, adding: “You do have failures and that’s why it rounds up to 100 rather than being 100%. We’ve got large enterprise customers, we serve mission critical applications, we know that if the service goes down customers fail, so we always aspire for 100%.”

The European cloud platforms are located in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan and Madrid. Easynet’s strategy differs from other vendors in that it collaborates and integrates with like-minded companies, rather than building up data centres around the globe.

The de rigeur location for a data centre is Hong Kong, with SoftLayer and Interoute setting up shop there in recent months. Yet Grannum disagrees.

“You can guarantee that if we built a platform in Hong Kong the next customer will want one in Singapore,” he argued.

“So our solution is to integrate with similar organisations to ourselves, the sort of organisations that take service exceptionally seriously, and have local support staff, as that’s a key part of our proposition,” he added.

Photo credit: theaucitron

DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley announced today a limited time free “Expo Plus” registration option. On site registration price of $1,95 will be set to ‘free’ for delegates who register during this offer perios. To take advantage of this opportunity, attendees can use the coupon code, and secure their registration to attend all keynotes, DevOps Summit sessions at Cloud Expo, expo floor, and SYS-CON.tv power panels. Registration page is located at the DevOps Summit site.

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Software development, like manufacturing, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle has often remained craftwork.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, will discuss the many lessons and processes that DevOps can learn from manufacturing and the assembly line-like tools, such as Platform-as-a-Service, that provide the necessary abstraction and automation to make industrialized DevOps possible.

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