Tag: IT

The high cost of distrust

A lack of trust in data is going to cost the world’s economy over a trillion dollars forecast a Cisco panel

A lack of trust in technology’s security could be costing the global economy over a trillion dollars a panel at the Australian Cisco Live in Melbourne heard yesterday.

The panel “how do we create trust?” featured some of Cisco’s executives including John Stewart, the company’s Security and Trust lead, along with Mike Burgess, Telstra’s Chief Information Security Officer and Gary Blair, the CEO of the Australian Cyber Security Research Institute.

Blair sees trust in technology being split into two aspects; “do I as an individual trust an organisation to keep my data secure; safe from harm, safe from breaches and so forth?” He asks, “the second is will they be transparent in using my data and will I have control of my data.”

In turn Stewart sees security as being a big data problem rather than rules, patches and security software; “data driven security is the way forward.” He states, “we are constantly studying data to find out what our current risk profile is, what situations are we facing and what hacks we are facing.”

This was the thrust of last year’s Splunk conference where the CISO of NASDAQ, Mark Graff, described how data analytics were now the front line of information security as threats are so diverse and systems so complex that it’s necessary to watch for abnormal activity rather than try to build fortresses.

The stakes are high for both individual businesses and the economy as technology is now embedded in almost every activity.

“If you suddenly lack confidence in going to online sites, what would happen?” Asks Stewart. “You start using the phone, you go into the bank branch to check your account.”

“We have to get many of these things correct, because going backwards takes us to a place where we don’t know how to get back to.”

Gary Blair described how the Boston Consulting Group forecast digital economy would be worth between 1.5 and 2.5 trillion dollars across the G20 economies by 2016.

“The difference between the two numbers was trust. That’s how large a problem is in economic terms.”

As we move into the internet of things, that trust is going to extend to the integrity of the sensors telling us the state of our crops, transport and energy systems.

The stakes are only going to get higher and the issues more complex which in turn is going to demand well designed robust systems to retain the trust of businesses and users.

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Ending the era of the IT manager

Is it now the turn of the CIO to go the way of the tea lady

Once every workplace had a tea lady; usually a happy friendly woman who cheefully dispensed tea, buscuits and office gossip around an organisation.

During the 1980s the company tea lady vanished as companies cut costs and changing workplaces made the role redundant, is it now the turn of the CIO to go the way of the tea lady?

Yesterday research company company Frost and Sullivan hosted in a lunch in Sydney outlining their views on the growth of cloud computing based upon their 2014 State Of The Cloud report.

The report itself had few surprises with a forecast of the cloud market growing 30% each year over the next five years, a statistic that won’t surprise many watching how users are moving away from desktop applications.

Shifting procurement

One of the key trends though is how cloud services change the procurement process and lock IT managers and Chief Information Officers out of decision making. As the report says;

Half of all organisations feel that the decision making process is shifting from that of the CIO and IT department to the individual business unit for implementation or updates of cloud applications such as HR, payroll, collaboration and conferencing.

While the report puts a positive spin on what it describes as the “evolving role of IT within organisations”, Mark Dougan – Frost & Sullivan’s Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand – mentioned that often the decision to adopt a cloud service were made by executive management and then the CIO was told to implement the technology.

This illustrates how CIOs’ already tenuous grip on being a senior management role has slipped. With the rise of cloud services, it’s become easier for executives to make choices without considering the technological consequences.

Probably the business that best illustrates this shift has been Salesforce where many corporations find they have dozens of subscriptions being charged to sales managers’ credit cards, much to the chagrin of company accountants and IT managers.  Salesforce and similar businesses have driven the trend so far that many consulting firms predict marketing departments will control more technology spending than IT managers in the near future.

That shift predates the coining of the word ‘cloud’, the term “port 80 and a credit card” was used to describe the Salesforce model of sales people signing up to what was then described as Software As A Service (SaaS) earlier in the century.

Does IT matter?

In 2003, writer Nicholas Carr predicted IT as a discipline would cease to matter within most organisations as technology became ubiquitous and taken for granted, just as electric power and railways did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The electricity and railway industries remain huge employers and are essential to modern business but most for most companies the products are taken for granted – few companies have a Chief Electricity Officer sitting on their executive team despite power being an essential service.

For those IT managers hoping for a senior c-level position or even a seat on the board, the move to the cloud is terrible news. Rather than getting the corner office, the CIO could be heading the way of the tea lady.

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Will Sony ever learn its security lessons?

Once again Sony remind us of the importance of IT security.

For the last week the gossip and tech industry websites have been full of revelations gleaned from a massive hack into the network of entertainment company Sony.

Sadly it isn’t surprising that Sony that targeted in that hack, 2011 was described by this site as the ‘year of the hack’ and at the time I wondered when corporate managers would start taking IT security seriously.

As the most recent security breach shows, Sony’s managers certainly weren’t taking their information security seriously as alleged North Korean hackers gleefully disabled systems and downloaded confidential documents.

While Sony’s woes are deeply damaging to the company, not least for the executives caught out gossiping about movie stars, the stakes are far higher for other companies.

In Turkey its alleged a 2008 oil pipeline explosion was caused by Russian hackers while in the US, Palestinian sympathisers are accused of causing massive damage to the IT systems of the Sands Casino group.

Sony may be one of the most digitally incompetent business in history – at least in respect to IT security – but it’s important for every business to making sure their information systems and critical business systems are hardened against attacks.

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IT becomes the plumbing

As the internet of everything and cloud computing takes over, IT is becoming just like the plumbing. This is a good thing.

One of the things that jumped out of last week’s smart city tour in Barcelona is that Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter is coming true — IT is now the plumbing.

That’s not to depreciate IT, it means the technology is now becoming so embedded in society and business that people no longer notice.

Like roads, electricity and water people assume it will be available but don’t notice the massive effort or investment required to make sure these services work.

With cloud computing, pervasive internet and connected devices, most business never need to see an IT worker.

For telco executives, IT managers and tech support people this is a blow to their egos as they always wanted their industries to be more than utilities.

In one way being a utility legitimises IT as it makes the industry more important than just a bunch of geeks playing with computers.

That also means that things have to work, ‘best effort’ services no longer cut it when you’re a utility and things have to work 99.99% of the time. Just like in plumbing.

Becoming the plumbing could be the best thing that happened to the IT industry.

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Google, Facebook and the Silicon Valley paradox

The paradox of Silicon Valley is cloud and social media companies want us to use the products they won’t use themselves.

One of the great advertising campaigns of the 1980s featured entrepreneur and Remington Shaver CEO Victor Kiam telling the world “I liked the product so much I bought the company”.

The modern equivalent of Victor Kiam’s slogan is “eating your own dogfood” where businesses use their own products in day to day operations. It’s a great way of discovering weaknesses in your offerings.

One of the paradoxes of modern tech companies is how they don’t always eat their own dogfood when it comes to their business philosphies – they expect their customers to take risks and do things they deem unacceptable in their own businesses and social lives.

The best example of this are the social media services where founders and senior executives take great pains to hide their personal information, a phenomenon well illustrated by Mark Zuckerberg buying his neighbours’ houses to guarantee his privacy.

Just as noteworthy  are the policies of Google’s IT department, for past five years most tech evangelists – including myself – have been expounding the benefits of business trends like cloud computing and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

Now it turns out that Google doesn’t trust BYOD, Windows computers or the Cloud, as the company’s Chief Information Officer, Ben Fried tells All Things D of his reasoning of banning file storage service Dropbox;

The important thing to understand about Dropbox,” Fried said, “is that when your users use it in a corporate context, your corporate data is being held in someone else’s data center.”

This is exactly the objection made by IT departments around the world about using Google’s services. It certainly doesn’t help those Google resellers trying to sell cloud based applications.

Fried’s view of BYOD also echoes that of many conservative IT managers;

“We still want to buy you a corporate laptop, get the benefits of our corporate discounts, and so on. But even more importantly: Control,” Fried said. “We make sure we know how secure that machine is that we know and control, when it was patched, who else is using that computer, things like that that’s really important to us. I don’t believe in BYOD when it comes to the laptop yet.”

Despite these restrictions on Google’s users, Fried doesn’t see himself or his department as being controlling types.

“But the important part,” Fried said, “is that we view our role as empowerment, and not standard-setting or constraining or dictating or something like that. We define our role as an IT department in helping people get their work done better than they could without us. Empowerment means allowing people to develop the ways in which they can work best.”

Fine words indeed when you don’t let people use their own equipment or ask for a business case before you can use Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.

That Google doesn’t give its staff access to many cloud services while Facebook’s managers restrict their information on social media shows the paradox of Silicon Valley – they want us to use the products they won’t use themselves.

Back in the 1980s, Victor Kiam liked what he saw so much that he bought the company. You’d have to wonder if Victor would buy Google or Facebook today.

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Smart cities and the sensors in your pocket

Community wide sensors promise to change government

National Public Radio’s Parallels program has story on how the Spanish city of Santander is wiring itself as a ‘smart city’ with a network of sensors wiring everything from garbage bins to parking spots.

The hope with the sensors is they’ll will improve local government’s services, allowing things like more efficient garbage collection and better pricing of parking meters.

What’s notable about the story is that smartphones are included as ‘sensors’ with Santander residents being able to submit data from their handsets.

The idea of smartphones as sensors isn’t new — pothole reporting apps were early to the iPhone — the increased sophistication of handsets and improved tracking technology is making them more powerful.

So we have another Big Data problem with local councils being flooded with information.

Processing all this information is going to require the community pitching in so the data is going to have to open.

Once governments make the data open it also creates opportunities for smart entrepreneurs to create new services and technologies.

Creating new opportunities is a hope of government sensor programs around the world, including Tasmania’s Sense-T project .

With factors like water quality and weather being monitored, existing sectors become more efficient and new industries are being created.

Hopefully the urge to hoard this rich, community data will be resisted by governments.

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Penny wise and pound foolish

Saving money on technology is often a bad investment as the V8 Supercars found

“We were penny wise and pound foolish” says Peter Trimble, Finance and Systems director of the V8 Supercars, about the IT setup he found when he started with the motor sport organisation 18 months ago.

The V8 Supercars were like many businesses who had outgrown their basic IT setup and were struggling as a result.

A touring organisation – “a travelling circus” as described by CEO David Malone – with 15 races in Australia, New Zealand the US has some fairly unique challenges as contractors, teams and a dispersed workforce put demands on the businesses which a basic small business system struggles to cope with.

What Trimble found at the business were employees struggling with cheap internet connections and antiquated, inadequate servers.

Focusing on the pennies and missing the bigger picture is a common problem when managements skimp on technology which leaves their staff spending more time on IT problems than getting their jobs done.

Basically the $80 a month home internet connection doesn’t cut it when you have more than two or three workers and the server that worked fine when those people were in the same office becomes a security risk when a dozen a people are trying to login over the Internet.

It wasn’t surprising the V8 Supercars management decided to go with a cloud computing service – in this case Microsoft Office 365 – and invest in proper, reliable internet connections.

What the Supercars found that being penny proud and pound foolish with IT doesn’t work for a business, office tech is an essential investment.

Paul travelled to the V8 Supercars in Launceston courtesy of Microsoft Australia. 

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