The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 132 - 17 Nov 2014
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In This Issue
Bob Benson on Strategic IT Management
Famous IT Precursors and Innovators
14 ACM Learning Center Books
Split & Spread for Cloud Security
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Strategic IT Management 

Our Cutter Consortium colleague Bob Benson will present his one-day workshop on Strategic IT Management in Mexico City on December 3. In this workshop, Bob "presents the IT culture, structure, and process transformations necessary to cope with today's business, government, and technology turbulence and sea changes." Click here for more information and to register. There will be simultaneous translation in Spanish.

Famous IT Precursors and Innovators  

Walter Isaacson, the author of a biography of Steve Jobs, has now published "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" (available in hardcover, Kindle and audio book editions).

Amazon's summary: "Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, JCR Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page."
ACM Learning Center Books
ACM published in October its periodic update to the list of most popular books by area of specialization. The latest list includes 14 titles:
"Split & Spread" to Mitigate Cloud Security and Privacy Risks
One of the key arguments against cloud adoption is the risk that placing your data outside your firewall puts it at risk of being stolen. Never mind that your firewall is not fool-proof, or that a cloud provider usually has more security personnel than you do; the issue is not so much reality as it is perception. For many CIOs, it is as much about managing career risk as it is about actual information security risk!

One solution, recommended in a recent Cloud Council paper, is to "anonymize" the data placed in the cloud, especially for customer financial or health data, and keep a correspondence table between the anonymous entries and the actual clients in a highly secure part of your own data center.

There is now a commercial solution that follows a similar principle called "split & spread": Kite, by Cofactor Computing. Not only does Kite split the data between multiple clouds, but a small key part of the data, without which the other pieces don't make sense, is kept in a protected on-premise server, making it highly improbable that anyone would be able to reconstruct the data in question.
Seen Recently...

"AI [Artificial Intelligence] is a tool, not a threat."

-- Title of a blog post by Rodney Brooks, MIT professor,

co-founder of iRobot, founder of Rethink Robotics