(c)iStock.com/xijian

The EU’s wide-ranging rules on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are set to significantly impact all businesses, whether in the EU or further abroad. From 2018, any organisation that collects, uses or shares personal information about European citizens will have to demonstrate compliance with the hotly contested law. This includes using various techniques to ensure that the protection of data is built into the design and infrastructure of an organisation by default.

Securing the data deluge

In an always-on, hyper-connected world, most people think of their data in terms of the live systems that hold their information. In reality, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Data is in fact being copied over and over – for development, testing, quality assurance, training, financial reporting, business intelligence and more. In addition, data is often accessed by third parties, contractors and consultants in other locations or countries often requiring only a username and password to secure access.

However, the EU GDPR will change all this. Moving forward, a software developer will need to be as security conscious as a database administrator – a concept that is likely to be foreign to them. Whilst there is already some level of data protection and ownership within organisations, the new regulations will spark an increase in the education, training and tools required to prove compliance with what is and isn’t allowed.

Introducing the carrot and stick

The new regulation cautions that any personal information needs to be “pseudonymised” so that the person is no longer identifiable, essentially introducing a ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ approach. A ‘carrot’ recommending pseudonymisation at specific points and reducing certain obligations on those businesses that follow this approach. A ‘stick’ in the form of a threat surrounding the penalties for businesses that are non-compliant.

Moving forward, a software developer will need to be as security conscious as a database administrator – a concept likely to be foreign to them

For many enterprises, this will mean that they need to re-architect operations to accommodate a data-first approach.

Currently, Delphix estimates 90% of data resides as copies in development, testing and reporting shared environments. The first step will be understanding where all the data sits in both production and non-production. The second step will require technology that has the ability to scale and protect all data, not just those bits of information that are the most sensitive.

This will require an investment in new technologies, for example data masking, that can pseudonymise data once and ensure all subsequent copies have the same masking policies applied. However, in the event of a data breach, the cost of these investments is likely to pale in significance when compared to the potential fines of 4 per cent of global turnover.

Conclusion

Given the ever-increasing occurrence and severity of data breaches, it’s becoming more and more important that customers feel their vendors are advocating a data-first approach. This means setting a data protection strategy that covers the entire organisation and reduces the risks to any individuals that are victim of a data breach.

By advocating the adoption of precautionary measures, the EU GDPR goes some way toward ensuring personal information is protected or rendered useless for any successful cyber-criminals that breach fortress walls. It also better protects organisations from the fallout that any data breach has on their finances, resources or reputation.

(c)iStock.com/Piotr Adamowicz

Big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to add £322 billion to the UK economy by 2020, according to research released by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) and analytics provider SAS.

The research, which builds upon a previous report from Cebr on big data analytics adoption, argues big data and analytics will contribute £40bn per year between 2015 and 2020. Back in 2012, Cebr argued the value of ‘data equity’ was at 0.7% of the UK’s gross domestic product, a figure which is expected to rise to 2.2% by 2020. IoT is expected to reach £81bn by 2020, to 0.7% of GDP. Overall, the market for the two by 2020 is expected to be twice the size of combined education, NHS, and defence budgets for 2015.

“Collecting and storing data is only the beginning,” said Cebr CEO Graham Brough, adding: “It is the application of analytics that allows the UK to harness the benefits of big data and the IoT. Our research finds that the majority of firms have implemented between one and three big data analytics solutions.”

“The combined benefits of IoT and big data will fuel our economy like nothing else,” said Mark Wilkinson, SAS regional vice president. “This report illustrates the considerable impact over the coming years of more organisations embracing big data and IoT to improve decision making that affects efficiency, risk management and new business opportunities.”

The telecoms industry currently has the highest rate of big data and IoT adoption, at 67% and 61% respectively, yet healthcare is expected to struggle in both big data analytics (52%) and IoT (26%).

Other research has examined how IoT will infiltrate workplace habits. A report from Webroot and IO argued that more than half of UK businesses polled plan to employ a ‘chief IoT officer’ in the coming year.

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The emerging Internet of Everything creates tremendous new opportunities for customer engagement and business model innovation. However, enterprises must overcome a number of critical challenges to bring these new solutions to market.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Martin, CTO/CIO at nfrastructure, will outline these key challenges and recommend approaches for overcoming them to achieve speed and agility in the design, development and implementation of Internet of Everything solutions within your organization.

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Deming, the patron saint of DevOps once advised, «It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.»
To survive, application development teams are constantly pressured to deliver software even faster. But fast is not enough. The best organizations realize that security, quality and integrity at velocity are mandatory for survival. Hence, DevOpsSec.
My aim here is to leave you uncomfortably amazed. While the pace of development has changed significantly, our processes to secure our applications has not changed enough. It is as if a wildfire has raged uncontained for years now but we have failed to take notice.
Maybe that sounds a bit crazy, but once I share a little background on what is happening, you’ll understand why innovation in this arena is critical for survival (when it comes to your applications). If you are aiming to ramp up your own Rugged DevOps or DevOpsSec practices, this is critical reading material.

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Your cloud is highly, if not completely, virtualized. So, you need scale and agility that conventional LUN- and volume-based storage, built for physical workloads, just can’t provide. Spending hours mapping applications to LUNs and constantly tuning performance no longer delivers guaranteed performance SLAs and quality of service (QoS). Even after that, you still lack visibility in a multi-tenant, multi-hypervisor environment, and resorting to guesswork in planning and troubleshooting certainly isn’t a stable way to scale, either.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Dan Florea, Director of Product Management at Tintri, will investigate the fundamental disconnect between your virtualized applications and underlying storage. Work in VMs, not LUNs or volumes.

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A typical software testing team might have a business expert, a toolsmith, a few technical investigators, and perhaps a manager.
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We’re fresh off a great week at DistribuTECH 2016 where we saw a gamut of technologies, thought leaders and trends. With utilities and energy still top-of-mind, our focus this week is on the changing face of the industry. This digital age means we have come to expect that the power will always charge, operate and run our numerous IoT devices. That’s why this week’s IIoT top news is dedicated to powering our electrical future. So, it should come as no surprise that, the electric power industry has made it their mission to protect and secure this precious power at all costs. The power initiative has teamed up with federal agencies, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to continue to build its capabilities.

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Fortunately, meaningful and tangible business cases for IoT are plentiful in a broad array of industries and vertical markets. These range from simple warranty cost reduction for capital intensive assets, to minimizing downtime for vital business tools, to creating feedback loops improving product design, to improving and enhancing enterprise customer experiences. All of these business cases, which will be briefly explored in this session, hinge on cost effectively extracting relevant data from disparate devices and applying data analytics ultimately, business logic to that data. Properly implemented, IoT can effectively deliver these business outcomes.

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