The Digital Consultant

Monday, 31 December 2012

2013 - The Year Ahead - Lucky For Some?

Here is a snapshot of the mega-trends and predictions for 2013.

Your personal data locker will become increasingly important to you and, if you haven't got one you already, you should probably consider it.

According to Forrester Research the business of managing personal data, which is already worth billions, will grow substantially in the next two years. Taking the US as an example, more than $2 billion is spent each year collecting data from third parties.

A cloud-based data locker has been described by CNN as "part virtual safe and part personal digital assistant.

"Dave Siegel, author of Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, argues these cyber vaults will eventually replace PCs, tablets, iPhones, and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Apple's (AAPL) Macintosh operating systems. Yes, Google (GOOG) Android, too."

2. Home Sweet Home:

The Connected Home is a component of the Internet of Things; where devices talk to devices, in many cases without human intervention.

Cloud-based smart home systems allow you to monitor and control your house from your smart phone, tablet, or computer, no matter where in the world you are at the time. An example of this is Lowe's Iris system.

Iris can be installed directly by the home owner and the basic level of monitoring service is free. This includes text alerts to the home owner when alarms are triggered; remote control of connected devices, thermostats and locks; and access to remote video streaming from cameras in the home via smart phone or computer. Lowe has partnered with AlertMe to produce this product.

3. Programmatic buying will get bigger

Programmatic buying allows advertisers to bid, often in real time, on ad space largely based on the value they have assigned to the consumer on the other side of the screen. It uses a range of technologies to achieve this. As this New York Times article notes, "major advertisers and many of the world’s largest ad agencies creating private exchanges to automate the buying and selling of ads."

4. A Sense of Touch and Smell

IBM believes that in the future computer devices will be able to mimic our ability to touch, taste, smell and hear. Sophisticated algorithms will be able to analyse why people like certain tastes and the chemical structure of food.

Download a copy

5. Cyber Security or insecurity?

If you own a cyber security company you could be in the money as many predict that banks and other online transactions sites, who have been seen a surge in cyber attacks, are anticipating that these will get even more sophisticated as time goes by. As a result these entities will increasingly turn cyber security firms to combat these intrusions.

We are still slack about cyber security matters. A recent study found that 35% of all data required data protection in 2010, but despite this, less than 20% of it is actually protected.

Ericka Chickowski, writing for Dark Reading believes that security research firms will turn away from less lucrative vendor contracts in 2013 and instead sell the information they glean about software vulnerabilities on the open market.

"Cyber-mercenaries are becoming more protective of their discoveries as the technology involved becomes more complex and the secrets more valuable".

Now this should be a worry to all as these cyber-mercenaries don't need to reveal who they have sold their research to although some like Vupen are on record as saying that they wouldn't sell their findings to oppressive governments or criminals.

eWEEK has also compiled some 2013 predictions to help organisations prepare to counter increasingly sophisticated hacks and malware.

6. The amount of Data will grow and grow.

By 2020 that amount of data on planet earth will be 40 Zettabytes; one Zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power bytes. According the Computer Weekly that equates to 57 times the number of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. I 'll have to take their word for it as counting grains of sand is simply soporific! Machine generated data is the main contributor to this increase, rising from the current 11% of all data top 40% by 2020.

Predictions from other sources.

Juniper Research predicts the following for wireless in the year ahead:

Big Data to Become Big Business
Smart Glasses & Other Wearables: 2013, the year of ‘announcements’
BYOD trend on the rise, as security issues escalate
Retail to embrace the in-store mobile strategy
Operators to adopt seamless WiFi & LTE connectivity
Mobile Becomes the Connectivity Hub
The Year of Microsoft
The multi-screen, seamless user experience becomes a reality
New mobile and tablet form factors to emerge
Social Gaming is on the Rise

CIO sees an end to offshore outsourcing. IT robots and autonomic systems will be taking over. So you will no longer need to be an engineer to create software or intelligently manage IT infrastructure. An example is Blue Prism; giving companies a software development toolkit and methodology to create their own software robots to automate rules-driven business processes. According to the company there are significant cost savings with its robot full-time equivalents (FTEs) costing a third of offshore FTEs.(video below)

And finally, the digital playing field is levelling out thanks to Cloud computing with developing countries able expand their role in the global economy. The University of California, San Diego's Dean of International Relations and Pacific Studies, Peter F. Cowhey, and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Michael Kleeman, found that Third World countries can now utilise the cloud in the same way developed countries have in the past. This is due to the lower costs, resulting in higher Internet adoption rates.

Emerging market businesses can now access similar storage, compute, and uses application services as the Global 2000 do.

Saturday, 22 December 2012

Are You Feeling Cyber Secure?

What would you do if your network's defences were breached and your precious user accounts, financial and customer data were pillaged?

Not only would your intellectual property be jeopardised but the chances are that just one such breach could put you on the road to ruin. Overstated? Not really when you consider how much your business now depends on the Net.

A National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec survey conducted in September of 2012 discovered that 77% of 1,015 small businesses (less than 250 employees) thought they were safe from cyber attacks. In this they were somewhat deluded, as 83% of them had no cybersecurity plan, although their online business operations were increasingly using social media and the Cloud. (see infographic below)

Raphael Ouzan, founder of BillGuard in New York says:

“When it comes to cybersecurity protection, the biggest problem that small and medium-sized business owners often fail to address also happens to be the most critical: Awareness.
A lack of awareness by employees is the root cause of most of data leaks and other security incidents, and no matter how secure your data centre may be or how strongly communications are encrypted, the weakest link will always be the human beings interacting with the network."

Symantec offered seven tips that companies could and should adopt to make things more difficult for hackers and cyber-criminals:

Determine what it is that you need to protect. Undertaking a security audit will pinpoint where you information is currently stored and used. You can then beef up your defences as required.
Enforce strong password policies. If you are serious about data protection then make sure your passwords are at least eight characters in length and contain combinations of letters, numbers and symbols. e.g. read!671DC. And do differentiate your passwords; don't use the same one for social media and online financial transactions for example.
Don't wait for a security disaster to occur. Plan in advance with a comprehensive Preparedness Plan which should:
- provide information on the identification of possible scenarios
- tell you which are your critical resource that need protection
- identify what is the appropriate security that needs to be put in place
- establish the regular routine of archiving of business-critical files using a suitable backup solution
- timetable the frequent testing you need to ensure your disaster response is satisfactory.
Encrypt highly sensitive information on desktops, laptops, mobiles and removable media to protect your confidential information from unauthorized access.
Educate your staff by providing training and a develop Internet usage and data security guidelines and policies. These should include clear guidelines for the sharing of information with any of the team that work remotely and details what you are prepare to share with your partners.
Using Wi-Fi connections in public cafes with phone or tablets can be particularly risky so they need to be made aware of the exact name of their network and login steps.
Clearly spell out what staff should do if they discover malware or suspect their data has been accessed by unauthorised third parties. The same applies if they inadvertently leave their laptop or data device on public transport (and yes it does happen!). What course of action should they take? Who in your organisation should they immediately contact?
Makes sure that the security solution you have chosen is modern and up to date. The pick of the anti-virus crop do more than just look for viruses and spam; they scan files regularly for unusual changes in file size, malware programs and suspicious email attachments.
Make it daily practice to update your security solution (anti-virus software). The best ones quickly respond to new viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other malware with new updates.

All of the above requires investment in time and also financially, but prudent risk management makes the above a necessity.

The founder of Flippa.com, Matt Mickiewicz, explains to the Washington Post's J.D. Harrison:

"Everything we do is online, so cybersecurity, and its inherent association with trust, is a high priority. It’s also a core competency of our team, so we tend to do the bulk of it ourselves. We use tools such as risk matrices, plotting likelihood against impact, to determine how much we invest in this space. Our resources are immediately assigned to anything with high likelihood and high impact."

So Most Expensive is Best?

Buying the most expensive antivirus product around may turn out to be a waste of money. A report, called Assessing the Effectiveness of Anti-Virus Solutions and carried out for he security firm Imperva by the University of Tel Aviv, suggests that poor detection means that free programs offer better value for business.

82 new malware files were tested through the VirusTotal system which checks files against around 40 different antivirus products; the initial detection rate was a big fat zero!

Imperva’s researchers concluded that two free antivirus products, Avast and Emisoft, were the “most optimal” of the ones they reviewed. McAfee also passed muster.

Imperva’s CTO, Amichai Shulman is quoted as saying “We cannot continue to invest billions of dollars into anti-virus solutions that provide the illusion of security, especially when freeware solutions outperform paid subscriptions.”

One product that looks promising is ZeroVulnerabilityLabs which addresses the security challenge from a different angle. You can try out their free program which they claim stops malware from exploiting a wide range of software vulnerabilities, whether they are known ones or not.

This free utility is part of a layered approach (users still need antivirus and other security mechanisms) to fight against the plague of exploit kits which are infecting thousands of users every day.