Outsourcing Conference 2014

But what is a crucial incident in one shot? It is not necessarily a dramatic situation as a major natural disaster, a serious accident, a medical incident, but an unusual or difficult situation, an event that requires human intervention, and relevant responsiveness. From Constantine Kalentis speech at Outsourcing Conference 2014. Topic: Strategic Planning with the use of Artificial Intelligence.

Bhimani on Internet Security

Anish Bhimani is the Managing Director and Chief Information Risk Officer of JP Morgan Chase. In this role he has global responsibility for ensuring the security, controls and resiliency of the firm's technology environment. It is always a pleasure to learn about future trends and challenges in security and privacy, in such a relaxed speech!

The critical factors for sustainable development

For some time now, an intense debate in Greece and the European Union has broken out, regarding the sustainable development model in relation to the proposed agenda. But it is clear by all sides that any development model cannot be sustainable when you disregard, science and technology. 

Through the use of the appropriate, modern technologies, sciences, structures and human resources, and when you ensure access especially in sensitive social groups, you have good chances to fulfill the main criterion to improve the living standards of your country. Moreover, the society as a whole enjoys the benefits of tiered productivity increase and thus by increasing the disposable income of a country.

Source: Article by Constantine Kalentis in Greek for apopseis.gr. The full article can be found in Greek here  

The evolution of Cyber Warfare

For those of us who study the evolution of cyber warfare over the years, it is terrifying to investigate the extreme power, the tactics, the methods and the dogma of current attacks. 

Key and Certificate based attacks - Code signing certificates - Weak Crypto exploits - SSH Key theft - APT1 - Malicious Executable - Server Key theft...

No shooting just clicking!

Information Technology, Innovation and the Insurance Industry

The "evangelists" of new technologies often overemphasize extremely high cost solutions, without understanding the economic facts and the specific requirements of each industry.

The insurance industry faces significant challenges due to the competitive environment, and the fluid regulatory and legislative framework.

Probably not everyone understands the core message, deciphering the deeper meaning of using technology with particular reference to business innovation.

Source: Article published by Constantine Kalentis at Insurance World Magazine, October 2013 Issue.

Leak of Confidential Information

The main advantage of social engineering techniques is that they can easily bypass any technological investment. The social engineering has proven to be a very effective way of penetration in an organization. 

Source: Article published by Constantine Kalentis at Communication Solutions Magazine Issue 83

Modern war tactics

As US troops get ready for a possible military intervention in Syria, it is worthwhile to keep an eye on the asymmetries of modern war tactics. At the same time pro-Syrian hackers brought down the website of the New York Times, and crippled that of Twitter, causing it to appear incorrectly.

By bringing down high profile U.S. websites the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) can surely affect how the U.S. response is perceived, both domestically and overseas.

Source: MIT Technology Review

The changing role of the CIO

More than twelve years ago, I had my first meetings with CIO’s in leading organizations and businesses. I can remember at that time the vast majority had a rich technical background, sometimes with little or no knowledge of the commercial business, so frustrated from multiple tasks such as software development and ad hoc integration to resolve, that looked to me very often as a hot boiler ready to explode. The pressure resolving technical issues was monumental. Of course management couldn't ever understand the cause of frustration. Let the CIO worry about technology.

The CIO’s role was always there: Checking out new trends in technologies, making decisions on key hardware and software purchases, deciding which are worth implementing and which should be ignored. Their role was defined by the dominant technology and the IT strategy as much as by their own expertise and talent in the field.

Today it is hard to even imagine a mid or a large company without a CIO who is monitoring the situation. And his image is changed too. The CIO looks more social, collaborative, business looking and the multi skilled function is shifting the dynamics to the modern day executive table. The CIO role has become so necessary, so counted upon that they spend most of their time in the tactical execution of a task or a project at a time.

The IT sector is driven by Cloud-delivered services including both software and data. As an increasing share of the new IT expenditure is going to such services, the CIO of today balances the business needs against the stream of opportunities and risks.

Software installation and maintenance will soon be or is already replaced by systems availability, responsiveness, information security and compliance. The CIO needs to be more strategic and have a clear idea of how a current technology can increase the company’s sales and not just how to reduce costs or to improve productivity.

The CIO is also facing changing priorities, smaller budgets and the lack of internal skills. As Information Technology and technologies it supports have become more complex, the role of the CIO has become also increasingly complex. There is a clear need for integration with the marketing team, and a direct line with the CEO. The CIO’s role should continue to grow not only in influence, but with a vision for the organization, to drive organizational change and enforce corporate performance in brand new ways.

But even today the communication between IT and Business can suffer. There is a need to gap the bridge in between, making sure that both sections of the organization collaborate efficiently and effectively in order to meet corporate goals. And this is the ultimate challenge for the years ahead.

Five Future Trends for Information Technology

Businesses are driven by the need for optimization and cost reduction as the first and immediate response from the economic meltdown. The ongoing economic crisis is originated from the highly-income world as represented by most of the OECD economies. The crisis today is far larger in shape and depth.

The scale of this present situation has a serious impact in operational and Information Technology (IT) budgets and in any case IT is not immune and is suffering from both the supply and demand side.  At the same time for being competitive as a business or as a country is considered for granted to be a top performer in new technologies, because technology is providing among the strongest competitive advantages against any competition. Under these dramatic circumstances how the economy of the future will look like is the real question.

Currently the situation has no room for major investments ready to be seen in the short run, never mind a few exemptions. Most IT departments suffer conservative cost reductions and the slow recovery as major analysts claim will last for many years. The future of the IT seems rather different in any case, from what we used to know by now. The forced retrenchment of the recession though gives the chance to business leaders and decision makers to reassess and reinvest in new growth areas.

Key areas in IT that will shape the leading sectors of the near future are the following:

1.   IT Architecture: It is common sense that businesses need to expand or enforce their international presence with whatever that means to their IT architecture design and infrastructure. Viewing everything through applications will soon come to an end. An IT Architecture project means to undertake hundreds of high level detailed tasks, including justifying changes, identifying data and security requirements, to further reduce complexity, to consolidate and centralize technology resources, to improve efficiency by restructuring enterprise resources. It means also that a server-centric topology will evolve to a service-centric topology, decoupling systems, data, infrastructures and business processes from one another.   

2.   User Experience: The clear expectations creating a positive User Experience (UE) environment can be overwhelmingly complex with many issues. These issues can involve usability, interaction design, brand identity techniques, industry specific strategies and requirements. In order to achieve high levels of user experience you need to clearly distinguish UE from the User Interface (UI) even if UI is a critical element of the user experience design. You need to encompass all elements of user interaction including, the organization, the customers, the products and the services.  

3.   Social Platforms: Company websites may no longer be the first point of contact for customers. IT is affected by a great manner from the way organizations conduct business. Isolated information will ultimately die, since social platforms evolve as a new source of business intelligence.  The benefits to a successful social brand are significant, and there are already known cases of businesses that successfully revitalized their image. Brands with relatively small budgets can achieve brand awareness, but they need to focus their resources, time and attention in a larger scale, in order to attract new customers. On which platforms to be, is a crucial question in any case. Social Platforms can also become for your business a place where you can provide advantages to your customers such as a loyalty card within a  mobile rewards game, the ability to do very tight targeting that combines gamification techniques that might include criteria such as geographic location, time of day, recommendations etc.

4.   Cyber Intelligence: Top Information security trends and vulnerability warnings will continue to shape and drive Information Technology, with hacktivism across the globe, a trend that started some time ago. Mainstream Cloud and Mobile adoption will engage security concerns that will become a more practical discussion in the near future. Executives are trying to take advantage of the productivity upside that new technology is capable to offer, with trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), thus creating a new security concern that must be under the radar. DDoS attacks against organizations that we have seen in the past, presages a future of blind full scale attacks to any intervening service provider. Other threats and vulnerability warnings combine, malware, sandboxing smart phone applications, cross platforms attacks, QR codes targeting, and digital wallets that will become a cyber crime target that will draw attackers’ interest.

5.   Data Privacy: This is already huge issue for international organizations which they are undertaking incisive analysis of important legal issues from a global perspective. Data processing at a company level, International data transfers, and technology issues related to privacy, conflicts between US privacy rules and European data protection law will become a much more serious concern. In a scale of a country, governmental surveillance technology issues related to privacy will be addressed more thoroughly in the near future.