Stories by Bob Violino

Massive investments in IoT will shake up the core skills in high demand at IT organisations in the years to come. Here’s how to transform your career path to capitalise.

A winning internet of things strategy requires strong leadership, clearly defined roles and a dedicated team. Pioneering IT leaders offer hard-earned advice for IoT success.

Independence has its upsides and downsides. IT pros lend firsthand advice on the challenges of going solo,

Recently hired security leaders share what hiring execs want to know in interviews.

In some cases traditional authentication processes are not enough to provide strong security throughout a user work session. That’s where continuous authentication comes in.

If security executives thought they had a lot to handle with the growth of mobile devices and the expanding digital enterprise, the emergence of connected products, corporate assets, vehicles and other “things” is taking security coverage to a whole new level.

The prospect of an army of robots marching in unison to launch an attack on an unsuspecting city belongs in the realm of science fiction—as do most images of menacing autonomous machines wreaking all kinds of havoc on civilization.

Security risks, both cyber and physical, certainly belong on the list of concerns. And with the ongoing shortage of professionals who are expert in various aspects of data protection—coupled with the seemingly endless stream of reports about data breaches and other security threats—this has become an even bigger concern for companies that are considering or in the midst of M&A deals.

As big data initiatives gain steam at organizations, many companies are creating “data lakes” to provide a large number of users with access to the data they need. And as with almost every type of new IT initiative, this comes with a variety of security risks that enterprises must address.

1.The concept is still quite new. The term data lake, credited to Pentaho CTO James Dixon, has been bandied about for several years. But the idea of data lakes as corporate resources is still in its infancy, according to IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni. A data lake is defined as a massive--and relatively cheap--storage repository, such as Hadoop, that can hold all types of data until it is needed for business analytics or data mining. A data lake holds data in its rawest form, unprocessed and ungoverned.

With such a heavy reliance on the Internet for all sorts of interactions and transactions and the many ways people are connected via their mobile or desktop devices, is it possible to remain invisible online?

Do you know any security executives who say they have everything they need to keep their organizations safe from threats? Chances are you don't.

Recent high-profile data breaches have clearly spooked a lot of companies, many of which expect to face cyber threats in the coming year. And security executives are spending more time advising senior executives and other top business decision makers at their organization on security-related matters.

The major technology shifts under way -- the move to cloud-based services and reduced importance of the data center, the growth of mobile devices and apps and related decline in use of traditional PCs, and the greater emphasis on big data/analytics rather than traditional analytics -- are having a huge impact on corporate IT.

Regulations aimed at protecting the security and privacy of organizations and individuals are well meaning. But sometimes these standards, or how they're interpreted, can be more than a nuisance--they can actually contribute to weaker security.