Tag: Policy

ThingWorx Says IoT Marketplace Will Speed Adoption

ThingWorx, the ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) vendor, has made empowering the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything) its rallying cry. Now the company says it is the first to market with an IoT “marketplace” that it claims will speed development of smart, connected products. The company announced ThingWorx Marketplace at Salesforce.com’s “Dreamforce” event in San Francisco on Monday. The new platform will allow ThingWorx and third party firms to offer “components and services” that are needed to build full-featured IoT applications. Those may be things like new kinds of sensors, widgets, device connectors, protocol adapters, hooks into device clouds or integrations with enterprise management platforms, according to a ThingWorx statement. The platform will be accessible by ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers, the company said.  Enterprises will be able to deploy private instances of the Marketplace to host internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, […]

Supply Chain Transparency Doesn’t Extend To Security

We live in an ever-more unstable world in which massive disruptions, whether natural or man-made, are a frequent occurrence. Companies that make everything from aircraft to mobile phones to cappuccino need to be nimble – sidestepping global calamities that might idle assembly lines or leave customers without their morning cup of coffee.  As in other areas, the benefits of technology advancements like cheap, cloud based computing, remote sensors and mobility are transforming the way that companies manage their vast, global network of suppliers. These days, supply chain transparency is all the rage – allowing companies to share information seamlessly and in realtime with their downstream business partners and suppliers. Firms like the start-ups Sourcemap, and LlamaSoft are offering “supply chain visualization” technology that leverages a familiar formula these days: mobility, social networking, crowd-sourced intelligence, and “Big Data” analytics. [There’s more to read about supply chain security on The Security Ledger.]  However, as […]

Identity Management’s Next Frontier: The Interstate

Factory-installed and even aftermarket identity management applications may soon be standard components on automobiles, as the federal government looks for ways to leverage automation and collision avoidance technology to make the country’s highways and roadways safer.   That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which finds that vehicle to vehicle communications are poised to take off, but that significant security and privacy challenges must first be met, identity management top among them. The report, GAO 14-13 (PDF available here) takes the measure of what the GAO calls “Intelligent Transportation Systems,” including vehicle-to-vehicle (or V2V) technology. The GAO found that V2V technology that allows automobiles to communicate with each other in ways that can prevent accidents has advanced considerably in recent years. Automakers, working with the Department of Transportation, are testing the technology in real-world scenarios. However, the deployment of V2V technologies faces a number […]

IT Risk And The Zombie Apocalypse: Surviving The Onslaught

One of the most vexing problems that faces IT organizations these days is how to measure their relative risk of being hacked or otherwise attacked. This sounds like pretty dry stuff, but it’s not. Failing to adequately account for your risks and exposure can mean the difference between swatting away an annoying intrusion attempt, and watching as foreign competitors or nation-states siphon off your critical intellectual property, bleeding your company of its competitiveness. But raising the alarm about this is always a tricky matter. Soft pedal it, and nobody takes you seriously. Scream from the rafters and …well…you’re screaming from the rafters. My friend and former colleague Josh Corman, however, found a good metaphor for the whole affair: the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. It’s all a bit of fun – though Mr. Corman is dead serious about the zombie stuff. Still, the idea is simple: attacks on your network and those of […]

At MIT Conference, Warnings of Big Data Fundamentalism

A senior Microsoft researcher issued a stern warning about the negative consequences of the current mania for data harvesting saying that a kind of “fundamentalism” was emerging regarding the utility of what’s been termed “Big Data” that could easily lead to a Orwellian future of ubiquitous surveillance and diminished freedom. Speaking to an audience of around 300 technology industry luminaries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Emerging Technology (EMTECH) conference, Kate Crawford, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Boston said that the technology industry’s fetish for “Big Data” had blinded it to the limits of analytics, and the privacy implications of wholesale data harvesting. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) annual Emerging Technologies (EMTECH) conference, a high-gloss event that throws entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and academics together to talk ‘big ideas’ on TED-inspired sets. Crawford’s speech, coming on the heels of a talk about transforming healthcare with big data […]