The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 213 - 2 April 2018
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In This Issue
Migrating Applications to the Cloud
Static Code Analysis
Google's Cloud IoT Core
InfoSecurity Europe
Impelo
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Migrating Applications to the Public Cloud
The March 28 webinar presenting version 2 of the Cloud Standards Customer Council's guide on Migrating Applications to Public Cloud Services was followed in real time by almost 120 people (and more than 200 overall). If you missed it, the slides and full recording are available here.
Static Code Analysis: A Look Back
A number of tools have been built, starting years ago, to find program errors through static analysis. This is in particular the basis of a series of techniques for the measurement of maintainability, reliability, performance, and security developed by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) and made into standards by the Object Management Group (OMG).

With 20/20 hindsight, it is interesting to look at an eight-year-old paper written by Al Bessey and others, "A Few Billion Lines of Code Later -- Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World," published in Communications of the ACM. The paper reflects on several years of commercial use of a code scanning tool built by Coverity in 2002 (Coverity was bought by Synopsys in 2014). Not only is the paper still relevant, but it is written in a refreshingly candid and often ironic tone. You don't need to understand in detail the C language snippets shown as examples to appreciate the issues seen by the tool creators, especially "social" issues that arise when a customer's programmer wants to find that the tool, not his code, is at fault.
Google's Cloud IoT Core
In February, SiliconANGLE reported on the launch of Google's managed service for IoT device management, Cloud IoT Core. Google is clearly playing catch-up with Microsoft Azure IoT Hub and Amazon AWS IoT, both launched last fall.

In a rare public statement of support for a technology vendor, Schlumberger's VP of Digital Technology, Chetan Desai, is quoted as saying: "We have been able to build quick prototypes by connecting a large number of devices over MQTT and perform real-time monitoring using Cloud Dataflow and BigQuery."
InfoSecurity Europe
InfoSecurity Europe will take place in London (no Brexit jokes, please...) on June 5-7. The UK security market alone is worth approximately $5 billion and is the most concentrated in Europe. This show represents an opportunity to identify vendors, buyers, and partners. Coming less than two weeks after the implementation of the European Union's Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the impact of new data privacy laws is likely to be on many attendees' minds.

If you are a U.S. company selling security products or services, you may want to take advantage of the help offered by the U.S. Commercial Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce, at the U.S. Pavilion. Contact Claudia Colombo for more information.
An Automated Teleconference Note Taker
Impelo, a Tel Aviv-based company, offers an "in-meeting, AI-powered virtual assistant that automatically listens in and captures key moments, notes and insights from every conversation." Disclaimer: we haven't tried it yet. But we find the idea intriguing... and can imagine the challenges of using such a tool in a multinational context (where there are many different accents) or when people talk over each other. Fortunately, there is a free trial offer for skeptics like us. The tool is integrated with the most popular teleconference systems: WebEx, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, and Zoom -- you just invite the virtual assistant to join your meeting, and it sends you notes shortly after the meeting ends. The tool only supports English for now, but Impelo says it is working toward supporting more languages.
Seen Recently...
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof [is] to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
-- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (vol. 5 of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)