Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Deloitte Predictions for 2013

Deloitte has released their 2013 report on trends in technology, media and telecommunications. Covering a wide range of topics, from the state of PCs to the BYOD trend, to the pending release of 4D television. For more on this report, and for the link to the report, follow this link.

Friday, January 18, 2013

The Changing Game in IT Security

Late last year, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report on an annual survey they had carried out online earlier in the year. The report, entitled "Changing the Game - Key Finding From the Global State of Information Security Survey 2013" followed from the responses of more than 9300 C-Suite executives from around the world.

The survey delved into a variety of issues around IT Security, including the state of security in the companies, the scope of spending, the importance of IT Security in various projects and current trends. The findings of this annual survey are always interesting. As might be expected, one point the survey made was that, as the result of mobility, the cloud and social media, IT itself is changing faster than Security, making it difficult to keep up. The report can be obtained here.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

IT Communications Technology Reduces Greenhouse Gases

A study released by Boston Consulting Group in December revealed that increased use of information and communication technology (ICT) such as video conferencing and smart building management could cut global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 16.5 percent by 2020, amounting to USD1.9 trillion in gross energy and fuel savings. The study shows that concerted action by policy makers to encourage the use of ICT can save 9.1 gigatons carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) of harmful greenhouse gases from being emitted—more than the current annual CO2 emissions of the U.S. For the study, click here.http://www.bcg.com/media/PressReleaseDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-122847

Monday, January 14, 2013

Targeted Attacks

Is your security good enough? Are you safe from targeted attacks? Check out this video to see what you're up against.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Are We Running Out of Room on the Internet?

There is concern in the Internet Technology circle that, with the phenomenal growth of mobile units, all of which utilize the internet, the system is going to run out of capacity in the future. In addition, the internet was originally designed as a client-server model which involves establishing a relationship between two people or organizations who then transfer data in the form of packets through fixed routes and between fixed stations. However, the profile of internet usage currently does not fit this model. Rather, with the growth in the number of mobile units, very little is fixed, certainly not routes and targets.

The result is that, not only is the need for additional broadband growing very fast, the basic model is out of touch with the current reality. The use of mobile units has gone from being a peripheral element of the internet to the predominant usage. This calls for a rethink of the architecture of the internet.

Currently there are major studies under way in this area. For a summary and some interesting links, check out this article.

The Ethics of Big Data

As the world careens towards more collection and analysis of data about - well, almost everything - there is growing evidence that the major issue with big data is that of ethics. Something that a lot of companies have difficulty grasping and therefore requires action by the people through legislation.

Already as a result of big data, existing privacy laws are badly out of date. That;s because they were written before the advent of big data, and therefore could not have anticipate the issues that are arising.

Companies are using big data to profile their customers, employees and anyone else they encounter. One of the difficulties about profiling is that it is often done with reference to a group rather than to an individual. A good example of profiling is categorization based on race. Thankfully, legislation has pretty well made such profiling illegal.

However, there are other inappropriate kinds of profiling to watch for. For example, American Express has been reported to have limited credit limits on people who shop at certain stores, on the basis that people who shop at those stores often have bad credit ratings. Clearly, Amex did some serious digging into the buying habits of certain people and then classified them

Profiling is well established in certain industries, insurance being a prime example. If you are a member of a certain demographic, such as teens, you will pay more for insurance. We've come to accept this, but then we know that some teens are very responsible and others not so. Little effort is expended to differentiate between them. We've come to accept this state of affairs, despite the inherent unfairness. And that's the trouble with profiling. The more it happens with different kinds of business, the more unfairness will creep into the system. One of the reasons for this historically has been the lack of data to support differentiation.

And yet, big data offers up the opportunity to differentiate - to do the profiling on a more individual basis. Lets not let business and governments take the easy route and generate more unfairness. Lets update the privacy laws to place greater control over the way data is being used, and make sure it is used fairly.

Friday, January 04, 2013

Failure in the Cloud

The recent Christmas Eve failure of Netflix pointed to a widely under-touted feature of cloud applications that companies need to concern themselves about. True, there has been much press about the security risks of the cloud, but this failure had nothing to do with security. The origin of the problem rested in the fact that Netflix relies on Amazon for its server base. And on Christmas Eve, Amazon's load balancing process failed, sending several servers down and making Netflix unable to access its movies.

So the customers at home who might have wanted to watch their favourite Christmas flick were jarred into the reality of depending on a cloud service.

For business, this is a serious lesson to consider. The reliability of most established cloud services is quite good, but the fact remains that the operational consistency and reliability of a particular service remains outside the control of the users. Any company considering outsourcing its critical applications to the cloud needs to consider this fact of life.For more on the Netflix issue, check this article.