From telemedicine to smart cars, digital homes and industrial monitoring, the explosive growth of IoT has created exciting new business opportunities for real time calls and messaging.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ivelin Ivanov, CEO and Co-Founder of Telestax, shared some of the new revenue sources that IoT created for Restcomm – the open source telephony platform from Telestax.
Ivelin Ivanov is a technology entrepreneur who founded Mobicents, an Open Source VoIP Platform, to help create, deploy, and manage applications integrating voice, video and data. He is the co-founder of TeleStax, an Open Source Cloud Communications company that helps the shift from legacy IN/SS7 telco networks to IP-based cloud comms. An early investor in multiple start-ups, he still finds time to code for his companies and contribute to open source projects.

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IBM has announced software that allows people to hide or anonymize their personal information on the Web, ensuring protection from identity theft and other misuse. Developed by researchers at IBM’s laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, the software – called Identity Mixer – will enable consumers to purchase goods and services on the Internet without disclosing personal information.
As consumers hand over personal details in exchange for downloading music or subscribing to online newsletters, they leave a data trail behind that reveals pieces of information about the size, frequency and source of their online purchases that can be traced back to the user. IBM’s Identity Mixer software eliminates the trail by using artificial identity information, known as pseudonyms, to make online transactions anonymous. For example, the software allows people to purchase books or clothing without revealing their credit card number. It can confirm someone’s spending limit without sharing their bank balance, or provide proof of age without disclosing their date of birth.

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Axios Systems on Tuesday announced it has selected CenturyLink Cloud as the hosting platform for Axios Systems’ IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions in Canada. CenturyLink, a global provider of communications and IT services, joins other leading technology providers across North America, Europe and APAC to help Axios’ international customers drive efficiencies and innovation across their service management provision. The arrangement with CenturyLink enables Axios to further strengthen its presence in the Canadian enterprise IT Service Management (ITSM) sector.

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«Government IT managers must accept that cloud computing services are services, not the purchases of technology. This usually represents a fundamental change in how technology is acquired and managed. Since the transaction doesn’t involve any physical entity, procedures and processes associated with the inspection, acceptance, inventory and management of IT may not apply. New parallel policies that apply to virtual the delivery of virtual services must, instead, be developed and put in place.»

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Risk management has been around for a long time. Financial managers run risk assessments for nearly all business models, and the idea of risk carries nearly as many definitions as the Internet. However, for IT managers and IT professionals, risk management still frequently takes a far lower priority that other operations and support activities.

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A common pattern in the past few years is the creation of centralized Release Engineering groups. These professionals apply common patterns for automating releases, they have a solid understanding of build and testing frameworks, and they help a large organization standardize software delivery. These centralized groups have become more popular as enterprises support an increasing number of applications and a faster release cadence.

In an ideal enterprise, all of your applications are packaged, delivered, and installed according to a standard, and these teams serve to apply and enforce enterprise IT policy. For example, the Release Engineering team may be responsible for a common Continuous Integration server, a standard approach to branching and tagging in source control, and the establishment of a common playbook for production releases.

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(c)iStock.com/sproetniek

Let’s face it, 2014 was a busy year for hacks and data breaches. There were the high profile Sony hacks, the record breaking fines handed out as a result of ePHI (electronic Protected Health Information) healthcare data breaches in the US, and sites such as Gmail and eBay were also targeted by hackers.

The potential for breaches to occur more frequently as businesses collect increasing amounts of consumer data was discussed at the CES conference earlier this year, and was highlighted as a concern by Barack Obama during his State of the Union address on January 20th.

There are a number of factors to consider when weighing up whether frequent or large data breaches are worse. After all, not all breaches are created equal.

Assessing the severity of a breach

Firstly, consider the type of breach – was it a malicious attack, or did it occur as a result of human error?

Secondly, the type of information that was breached will determine the severity. Even a small breach can cause a significant amount of damage if personal or financial information is involved.

The high profile Sony hack was not its first major hacking incident; in fact, Sony has fallen victim to five breaches since 2013. While the focus of the most recent hacks was widely reported to be the early release of five movies in response the the release of The Interview, the hack revealed the US Social Security numbers of more than 47,000 celebrities, freelancers, and current and former Sony employees, as well as medical records, salaries, and other sensitive personal information that can be used for identity theft. Nearly all of this information was stored in Excel spreadsheets, which had absolutely no form of password protection.

Other notable breaches in 2014 included JP Morgan Chase, which saw 83,000,000 records breached for use of identity theft. Or Home Depot, which saw 109,000,000 records breached in order to gain access to financial information. eBay also had 145,000,000 records breached, again for identity theft.

Social networking sites often fall victim to hackers too; Twitter has experienced 11 hacking incidents since 2013, although the majority of these are considered to be minor, and affected single accounts in most instances. The most common type of breach in this instance proved to be a nuisance, rather than harmful.

Snapchat experienced two breaches in 2014, and both times a significant amount of personal data was leaked online. The first breach saw 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers being breached, and later, in October 2014 almost 98,000 stolen files were posted to The Pirate Bay. Snapchat blamed third-party applications for the breach, although they didn’t name the culprit. This hack occurred despite a warning from a data security report conducted in August 2013 showing that Snapchat’s data was vulnerable to attack.

The highest ever fine in HIPAA history was also handed out in 2014, following a data breach that saw the electronic PHI of 6,800 patients disclosed on Google. The New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center together have agreed to hand over a whopping $4.8 million to settle the alleged HIPAA violations.

When determining which is worse – the frequency or the size of a breach – the simple answer is that any breach can be devastating. It is therefore essential that organisations, large and small, put security and compliance at the top of their agenda this year.

Preventing data breaches from happening

Organisations may encounter numerous attempted cyber attacks every day without even knowing it. Here is a list of necessary steps and actions which every organisation should be taking, in order to avoid potential breaches:

• Perform regular risk assessments to identify where valuable data is stored, and how it is transmitted internally and externally.
• Perform vulnerability scanning on a regular basis, followed by penetration testing for the most critical assets to identify and remediate security weaknesses.
• Deploy technologies to protect against all attack vectors, ensuring security and authentication software is installed on all devices.
• Partner with a third party team of experts to help ensure your organisation has enough manpower and skillsets in-house to deal with cyber attacks, and to make sure those technologies are installed, optimized and working continuously.
• Use adequate authentication and encryption on all devices, especially around the storage and exchange of documents and data.
• Create and regularly practice an incident response plan as part of the organisation’s business continuity planning so that if a breach occurs, the business knows what steps to take to contain it and minimise the damage.
• Educate employees about appropriate handling and protection of sensitive data. Lost, stolen and discarded devices containing critical information illustrates that corporate policy designed to safeguard portable data only works when employees follow the rule; and this is especially important given the increase in the number of mobile devices used by organisations over the last few years.

(c)iStock.com/graffizone

IBM has announced the launch of Identity Mixer, a cloud-based technology which aims to protect personal data by only revealing the bare minimum for transactions, on its BlueMix developer platform.

The release, which has not coincidentally been pegged for Data Privacy Day, uses a cryptographic algorithm to only reveal selected pieces of a user’s information, such as date of birth, home address, and credit card number, to third parties.

An example given of how this service works is through a video streaming service for age-restricted films. Instead of a user submitting full date of birth and address to assess whether they are old enough and in the right region to view the film, Identity Mixer will tell the streaming service only the fact that the user is old enough and in the right region.

The completed product has taken over a decade of research, and is available for developers to test in their own applications and web services. Developers can choose the type of data they wish to secure, and BlueMix will provide the code.

“Identity Mixer enables users to choose precisely which data to share, and with whom,” said Christina Peters, IBM chief privacy officer. “Now web service providers can improve their risk profile and enhance trust with customers, and it’s all in the cloud making it easy for developers to program.”

This innovation is hardly surprising, as IBM has won the most US patents for 21 years in a row, with the culture of the organisation deeply embedded in its staff. When this publication spoke to UK&I cloud leader Doug Clark back in March, he explained even he had a patent, despite being a “salesy” person. Despite this, IBM’s most recent financial results left analysts unconvinced, even though the company hit its target of $7bn in yearly cloud revenue.

Take a look at the video below which explains Identity Mixer in more detail:

Apache Drill is an open source, schema-free SQL query engine—that enables a business to extract the most value possible from data stored in Hadoop. Apache Drill does this by breaking down many of the technical barriers that had restricted the ways that analysts could work with data, and limited the intelligence that they could glean from it. With Apache Drill, data scientists are no longer constrained by the limitations of last generation tools, and they are free to work with data in a myriad of productive ways without draining IT resources.

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AWS was in the premier position having had a head start of more than 4 years in the cloud related business. The lowering of prices by Microsoft; a new CEO; an emphasized bet on the cloud have all contributed to Microsoft Azure’s adoption by the enterprises. One of the reasons for this being the better tooling; the variety of applications and services; and not-for-Windows only shift have all contributed.

Microsoft brought in a lot of enhancements that should prove this advantage Microsoft has gained further. The storage options with SSDs and the rapid, multifaceted updates to its Azure cloud computing platform are all very attractive for enterprises.

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