6 ways to maximize your IT training budget

Customized, in-house training often zeros in on topics relevant to your business. However, it comes with an equally high price tag. If your employees simply need to fill in knowledge gaps or get up to speed with a specific software package, there are a plethora of affordable, flexible options for even the most limited budgets.

Although the economy is picking up ever so slightly, IT departments remain on the lookout for ways to do more with less – fewer people, fewer resources, less money. That's why learning how to stretch the training budget as far as possible can pay significant dividends. This is true both for those organizations seeking to develop employee skills and knowledge for the least expenditure, and for employees looking to improve and enhance their career potential and longevity.

If an organization can get its employees to buy into training and career development, they can literally double their dollars when costs get split 50-50. This is already an implicit aspect in many tuition support programs, where employers offer a partial stipend or payment to help cover the costs of academic coursework. Why not make it a part of how IT training dollars get spent, too?

Some IT departments offer their employees a menu of courses or certifications from which employees can choose, coupled with (partial) reimbursement plans to help defray their costs. By offering more support for those credentials it needs the most, and less for those credentials outside the "must-have" list, organizations can steer employees in the directions they want them to go.
Negotiate Discounts to Control Costs

Times are tough for training companies, too. If you do want to buy into online or classroom training, you'll get a better bang from your budget if you negotiate a "group rate" of sorts to cover some or all of your training needs.

Although online or virtual classes may not be as popular as instructor-led in-class training, remote offerings usually cost less to begin with; obtaining additional discounts will help leverage such spending even further. Some training companies offer subscriptions to their entire training libraries on a per-seat, per-month basis.

Pluralsight offers its extensive training catalog to individuals for about $50 a month, for example, and its business offerings include progress tracking and assessments for enrolled employees, as well as library access for some number of individuals. A 10-user license costs about $25 per month, per individual user for a Basic package, and double that for their Plus package, which adds exercises, assessments and offline viewing to the basic ability to watch courses online on a PC or mobile device.
Purchase Key Items in Bulk

If you know you need to run a team of system engineers or senior tech support staff through a specific curriculum that includes certain certification exams, and you can hold those people to a schedule, then you can purchase exam voucher or training/voucher bundles at a discount. As the purveyor of many popular and high-demand cert exams, and a publisher of copious related training materials, Pearson VUE/Pearson Education offers much of what employers need for such programs. Contact the Voucher Store to inquire about volume purchase pricing and arrangements.

(Note: The author writes on an occasional basis for InformIt, a professional development branch of Pearson, and on a frequent basis for the Pearson IT Certification blog.)
Assemble Employee Study Groups and Resources

Just a little added support for employees involved in training, or preparing for certification, can help organizations realize better results from (and returns on) their training investments. Consider some or all of the following strategies to help employees make the most of their training experience and get the best value for your training dollars

Set up a wiki or online forums/chat rooms on a per-topic or per-exam basis for employees to use and share.
Encourage employees to share their best resources, learning materials, study techniques and so forth with one another. Build compendia of such materials and pointers for ongoing sharing.
Provide access to practice tests, exercises and simulated or virtual labs for hands-on work so employees can check their learning, buttress their weak spots and develop a well-rounded understanding of training materials, exam objectives and coverage.
Identify local subject matter experts to whom training and certification candidates can turn for added information and explanation when the

Because many employees will be interested in these kinds of things, you can find volunteers to help create and maintain these kinds of low-cost but high-value training and prep tools and resources.

Provide Recognition and Rewards to Those Who Succeed
Sure, it would be nice if everyone who earns a certification or masters some new body of knowledge could get a 25 percent raise and/or a promotion as a consequence of completing a program of some kind. In some cases, such rewards may even be required to retain employees who earn coveted credentials such as the Cisco CCIE, (ISC)2 CISSP or the ITIL Master Qualification.

However, even small rewards, such as a $100 gift certificate for a family night out or a gift card to a local department store can communicate your appreciation to those employees who manage to chew, swallow and digest what they must bite off to pursue training and certification. A public pat on the back in the employee newsletter or at a period employee meeting doesn't hurt, either. Recognition provides added impetus for employees to finish what they start and shows them that you value the time and effort they must expend in pursuing training and certification.
Ask for Ideas and Suggestions, Then Act Upon Them

Beyond the various methods to stretch your training budget outlined here, you can also turn to your target audience to ask how it thinks you can maximize the return on training and certification. You may be surprised by the quality and quantity of resulting feedback. Most employees respond positively to on-the-job opportunities for career and professional development. They, too, understand that the likelihood of continuing support rests on the outcomes of their training and certification efforts. In the end, they know full well that, by helping the organization excel and improve, they too will benefit from improved job and pay prospects.

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Major banks prep their own mobile payment apps

The apps could prove to be a major competitor for Apple Pay and competing products

Several major national and international banks are planning to launch their own mobile payments apps next year.

The banks would be major competitors to handset makers Apple and Google because unlike others pushing mobile wallet technology, such as mobile phone carriers and retailers, they already have an intimate relationship with consumers and know their spending habits.

"Banks all around the world are working on this right now," said James Anderson, senior vice president for mobile and emerging payments at MasterCard.

Anderson didn't name any of the banks, but said MasterCard is already in conversations with them on how to add mobile payment capability to the existing apps that millions of consumers already have on their phones.

The most likely way will be through a technology called host card emulation, that was introduced in Android 4.4 "KitKat" and allows software apps to emulate the secure element chip found on some bank cards and the iPhone 6. Using software means wider compatibility with phones than if a dedicated chip was required.

The mobile payments market had been relatively quiet until recently. Google Wallet and Softcard, a competitor backed by cellular carriers, were in the market but consumer awareness and interest appeared to be low.

That changed with the launch of Apple Pay on Oct. 20. A million cards were activated in the first three days of use and early adopters have praised its ease of use: users just need to hold their thumb over the iPhone 6 fingerprint reader and bring the device near a terminal for payment to be made.

As a result, competitors are planning their attack. Next year CurrentC, backed by some of the biggest retailers in the U.S., will launch and companies like PayPal are also hoping to expand their footprint in stores.

But an app from a bank might have an edge because it removes a potential hurdle to adoption: unease among consumers that at a third-party is getting access to details of purchases they make.

Apple has stressed that it doesn't see any of the purchases made by its users but Google's system is set up so that all payments run through the company's servers -- giving the company an additional layer of information into the lives of its users.

A bank already has access to this information because of its nature and is presumably trusted by its customers. If a customer has a banking app on their phone, it would suggest they also have faith in the bank's online security system.

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Internet of Things roundtable: Experts discuss what to look for in IoT platforms

Networking is at the heart of every Internet of Things deployment, connecting sensors and other “Things” to the apps that interpret the data or take action.

But these are still early days. Assembling an IoT network from commercial off-the-shelf components is still, let’s just say, a work in progress. This will change over time, but for now the technical immaturity is being addressed by System Integrators building custom code to connect disparate parts and by a new class of network meta-product known as the IoT Platform.

IoT Platform products are still in their infancy, but there are already more than 20 on the market today. Approaches vary, so when making a build or buy decision, consider these critical areas of IoT Platform tech: security, sensor compatibility, analytics compatibility, APIs and standards.

iot platform diagram Iot-Inc.
To see where we stand on developments in these areas, I emailed experts from seven IoT Platform companies, big and small, asking for input: Roberto De La Mora, Sr. Director at Cisco, Steve Jennis, SVP at PrismTech, Bryan Kester, CEO at SeeControl, Lothar Schubert, Platform Marketing leader, GE Software, Niall Murphy, Founder & CEO at EVRYTHNG, Alan Tait, Technical Manager at Stream Technologies and Raj Vaswani, CTO and Co-Founder, Silver Spring Networks. Here’s what they had to say:

* Security
De La Mora: Security technologies and solutions that are omnipresent in IT networks can be adapted (carefully) to serve Operational Technology in IoT environments. But security is not about adding firewalls or IPS/IDS systems here and there. Cyber Security for IoT should follow a model applied at every layer of the architecture, and be combined with physical security to add intelligence to the operation via data correlation and analytics.

Jennis: Without a standards-based security framework it is very difficult to create communication channels that are both secure and interoperable. An interoperable security solution is very important in order to prevent vendor lock-in and to enable the system to be extended if required.

Kester: Sophisticated customers are encrypting traffic between the sensor board and the cloud. However most deployments are using private VPNs which don’t require a lot precious CPU or RAM from the remote device/system.

Murphy: Crypto-secure digital identities for physical things enable authenticated identities online by applying token-based security methods through Web standards to manage application access to these digital identities.

Vaswani: Embed security at each layer of the network, including sophisticated authentication and authorization techniques for all intelligent endpoints, require digital signatures and private keys to prevent any unauthorized access or activity on the system, and end-to-end encryption for all communications across the network. Incorporating physical tamper detection and resistance technologies further reduces the risk of unauthorized access and monitoring.

* Sensor Compatibility
Jennis: The following Platform considerations should be taken into account:

· Memory footprint – how much memory does the Platform require to function? Some simple sensors have only 128KB of memory to work with.

· Operating system support – does the Platform require a full POSIX-like OS or can it accept something simpler?

· Network stack support, e.g. IPv4, IPv6, 6LoWPAN, other – simple sensors used in Low Power Wireless Area Networks (LoWPAN) may require a cut down IP stack.

· Programming language support – a Platform may provide APIs for only specific programming languages (e.g. C or C++).

· Java dependence – does the Platform require a JVM to function, limiting sensor choices?

Murphy: The most important consideration is recognizing the risks inherent in vertically integrated solution architectures. By definition, the Internet of Things is heterogeneous in the types of things it is connecting. A horizontal architecture, to manage the information from and about the things they are connecting, can abstract the transport layer from the application layer. This allows applications to be developed independently of specific sensor devices, and sensor devices to be changed and network connectivity methods changed without breaking the application dependencies.

Schubert: A Software-Defined Machine (SDM) decouples software from the underlying hardware, making machines directly programmable through machine apps and allows connecting with virtually “any” machine and edge device, including retrofitting machines and connections to legacy systems.

* Analytics Compatibility
De La Mora: Support for structured and non-structured data, ease of integration with existing operation, automation and control systems, and the ability to operate in a distributed computing environment are all important factors for analytic compatibility.

Kester: To do advanced long-term business intelligence, machine learning or Hadoop-type of parallel processing, your Platform choice should have a well-documented and Web accessible API to interface with your analytic product of choice. It should also be easy for any IT employee, or even savvy business analysts, to use without training.

Murphy: The network platform has to enable multiple disparate audiences within a company access to benefit from data collection and perform meaningful analysis. Analytics is often thought of in a reporting sense only, but increasingly analytics is being applied in conjunction with machine learning algorithms and rules logic to drive applications and actuate devices.

Tait: You need to be sure the information you are collecting is stored well (backed up, secure, etc.) and that you have the ability to export your data and you maintain ownership.

Schubert: The tremendous data growth in industrial IoT demands massively scalable, low-cost infrastructure, such as that based on Apache Hadoop v2 and COTS (commercial off-the shelf) hardware. It has to support the various security, compliance and data privacy mandates. Predictive Analytics is how value is delivered to customers. It provides timely foresight into asset and operations, and provides actionable recommendations (when paired with rule engines). Perhaps most important, analytics need to be integrated into the operational processes, rather than be a stand-alone IT solution.

* APIs
De La Mora: RESTful API’s are becoming standard. The abstraction capabilities they provide, along with the architectural model based on the Web, are key. SDK’s that provide API’s that are not compatible with the W3C TAG group are a nonstarter for applications that should be in the end, connected to the Internet.

Jennis: First and foremost, APIs should be clean, type-safe and idiomatic. In addition, APIs should favor non-blocking/asynchronous interaction models to make it easier to build responsive systems. Where possible APIs should be standardized to ease component integration and prevent lock-in.

Murphy: APIs should use Web standards and blueprints (e.g. REST and no WSDL/SOAP), and state-of-art Web security systems. They should also offer ways of extracting the data, not just feeding it in.

Tait: Keep it simple, truly good APIs are clear, concise and have a purpose. They should also do the common things easily.

Schubert: Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and related application development paradigms rely on APIs for integration of services, processes and systems. APIs must be open, accessible and upgrade-compatible.

* Standards
De La Mora: We are calling this the Internet of Things because it will be part of the next generation of the Internet, so the only key standard protocol, that I see in the future, is IPv6.

Kester: Any Platform that is in communication with devices should support the major communication protocols in use today, which are UDP, MQTT, XMPP, CoAP, Modbus/TCP and HTTP.

Murphy: RESTful application programming interfaces, JSON and similar Web-centric formats for data exchange should be used. The Platform that an enterprise uses to manage its physical products and assets as digital assets, needs to be able to integrate smoothly with both the enterprise’s other systems and third party applications. Integration means both the technical protocols of system-to-system interaction (e.g. REST, OAuth) but also critically, the semantics of the information itself.

Vaswani: The use of universal standards such as IP ensures that products can be easily mixed and matched from different vendors to ensure full interoperability and to deliver on other applications supported by an even broader ecosystem of hardware and software players.

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9 employee insiders who breached security

These disgruntled employees show what can happen when an employer wrongs them.

Security admins used to have to worry about keeping the bad guys out of the network, but there have been many documented cases where the devil you know is sitting right next to you. A review of recent FBI cyber investigations revealed victim businesses incur significant costs ranging from $5,000 to $3 million due to cyber incidents involving disgruntled or former employees, according to AlgoSec. Here are just a few over the years of insiders trying to take down their employer's network.

Terry Childs, the former network administrator for the City of San Francisco, held the city's systems hostage for a time. He refused to surrender passwords because he felt his supervisors were incompetent. Childs was convicted of violating California's computer crime laws in April 2010.

In June 2012, Ricky Joe Mitchell of Charleston, W.Va., a former network engineer for oil and gas company EnerVest, was sentenced to prison for sabotaging the company's systems. He found out he was going to be fired and decided to reset the company's servers to their original factory settings.

It was discovered in 2007 that database administrator William Sullivan had stolen 3.2 million customer records including credit card, banking and personal information from Fidelity National Information Services. Sullivan agreed to plead guilty to federal fraud charges and was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison and ordered to pay a $3.2 million fine.

Flowers Hospital had an insider data breach that occurred from June 2013 to February 2014 when one of its employees stole forms containing patient information and possibly used the stolen information to file fraudulent income tax returns.

According to Techworld.com, 34-year-old Sam Chihlung Yin created a fake VPN token in the name of a non-existent employee which he tricked Gucci IT staff into activating after he was fired in May 2010.

Army Private First Class Bradley Manning released sensitive military documents to WikiLeaks in 2009. Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning, was given a sentence of 35 years in prison.

Back in 2002, Timothy Lloyd was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for planting a software time bomb after he became disgruntled with his employer Omega. The result of the software sabotage was the loss of millions of dollars to the company and the loss of 80 jobs.

Earlier this year, NRAD Medical Associates discovered that an employee radiologist had accessed and acquired protected health information from NRAD’s billing systems without authorization. The breach was estimated to be 97,000 records of patient names and addresses, dates of birth, Social Security information, health insurance, and diagnosis information.

And of course there is the most famous whistleblower of all time: Edward Snowden. Before fleeing the country, he released sensitive NSA documents that became a blowup about government surveillance.

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Gartner: Top 10 strategic predictions for businesses to watch out for

For a session that is high-tech oriented, this year’s Gartner strategic predictions were decidedly human.

That is to say many were related to increasing the customer’s experience with technology and systems rather than the usual techno-calculations.
Gartner 2014

“Machines are taking an active role in enhancing human endeavors,” said Daryl Plummer is a managing vice president, chief of Research and chief Gartner Fellow. “Our predictions this year maybe not be directly tied to the IT or CIO function but they will affect what you do.”

Plummer outlined the following predictions and a small recommendation as to what IT can do to prepare for the item. Read on:

1. By 2018, digital business requires 50% less business process workers and 500% more key digital business jobs, compared to traditional models. IT leaders — need to develop new hiring practices to recruit for the new nontraditional IT roles.

2. By 2017, a significant disruptive digital business will be launched that was conceived by a computer algorithm. CIOs must begin to simulate technology-driven transformation options for business.

3. By 2018, the total cost of ownership for business operations will be reduced by 30% through smart machines and industrialized services. CIOs must experiment with precursor "almost smart machine" technologies and phantom robotic business process automation. Business leaders must examine the impact of increased wellness on insurance and employee healthcare costs as a competitive factor.

4. By 2020, developed world life expectancy will increase by 0.5 years due to widespread adoption of wireless health monitoring technology. Business leaders must examine the impact of increased wellness on insurance and employee healthcare costs as a competitive factor

5. By year-end 2016, $2.5 billion in online shopping will be performed exclusively by mobile digital assistants. Apple’s Siri is a type of assistant, but many online vendors offer some sort of software-assist that you may or may not be aware of. Marketing executives must develop marketing techniques that capture the attention of digital assistants as well as people. By the end of 2016, $2.5 billion in online shopping will be performed exclusively by mobile digital assistants.

6. By 2017, U.S. customers' mobile engagement behavior will drive U.S. mobile commerce revenue to 50% of U.S. digital commerce revenue. Recommendation: Marketing executives must develop marketing techniques that capture the attention of digital assistants as well as people. Mobile marketing teams investigate mobile wallets such as Apple's Passbook and Google Wallet as consumer interest in mobile commerce and payments grows.

7. By 2016, 70% of successful digital business models will rely on deliberately unstable processes designed to shift as customer needs shift. CIO need to create an agile, responsive workforce that is accountable, responsive, and supports your organizational liquidity.

8. By 2017, more than half of consumer product and service R&D investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations. Consumer companies must invest in customer insight through persona and ethnographic research.

9. By 2017, nearly 20% of durable goods e-tailers will use 3D printing to create personalized product offerings. CIOs, product development leaders, and business partners—evaluate gaps between the existing "as is" and future "to be" state (process, skills, and technology.)

10. By 2018, retail businesses that utilize targeted messaging in combination with internal positioning systems (systems that know you are in or near a store) will see a 20% increase in customer visits. CIOs must help expand good customer data to support real-time offers.

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First Look: BlackBerry Passport

BlackBerry does an about-face, back towards its enterprise roots.

So BB 10 didn't work out so well, did it?
Which helps explain why, with the new Passport smartphone, BlackBerry is ditching the years-late emphasis on competing for consumers and refocusing on the enterprise users on which the company was built. The Passport is uniquely focused on being a device for work first and personal stuff second - take a look at how it's turned out.

It's hip to be square
We're just not used to square screens anymore, are we? I think the last one I used was on a flip-phone, circa about 2005. So in a sense, BlackBerry's not putting the Passport in great company there. Given that this screen is 4.5 inches and boasts 1440x1440 resolution, though, it's probably OK.

Big in Canada
It's a big device, there's no getting around that - as the name suggests, it's the size of a U.S. passport. That said, it's no more outsized than other recently released phablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 or the iPhone 6 Plus.

Of course it has a keyboard
It's a new design, and it incorporates some intriguing touchpad functionality, like swiping to select auto-suggest entries. And it's a business-focused BlackBerry device - of course it has a physical keyboard.

A voice search thingy!
One of many catch-up boxes checked by the Passport, the new voice search functionality appears to work more or less the same way as Siri/Cortana/Google Voice search, et al.

Blend
The impressive BlackBerry Blend system provides an app that can run on other mobile devices, as well as on desktops and laptops, that brings files and messages from the Passport to whichever device you happen to be using at the time, and segregates them into personal and enterprise spaces.

Some apps
BlackBerry bolsters its own somewhat limited app offerings with access to the Amazon App Store, which provides a larger selection of Android apps for use on the Passport.

Under the hood
The Passport's specs bring it into line with the latest Androids and iPhones - a 2.2GHz, quad-core Snapdragon processor, 3GB of RAM, a 13MP camera with optical image stabilization and 32GB of on-board storage, with a microSD slot for expandability. It's also got a big 3450 mAh battery, which BlackBerry was eager to talk up.

The nitty-gritty
The Passport goes on sale tomorrow from Amazon and BlackBerry directly, for $600 unlocked. It'll be available on-contract from as-yet unspecified carriers for about $250, BlackBerry said.

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Android Power's 3 favorite things for August 2014

From powerful custom shortcuts to pleasingly pretty home screens, these three simple tools bring fresh functionality to any Android phone or tablet.

This summer's been a wild one for mobile tech launches, and that means it's been a while since I've had a chance to take a deep breath and think about all the interesting little treasures that round out the Android experience.

From apps to accessories and everything in between, Android is full of easily overlooked items -- seemingly small things that make our lives easier or make the mobile landscape a more pleasant place to live.

Now that we have a brief breather between the rapid-fire product launches, I thought I'd take a moment to step back and shine the light on a few of my favorite things, as I occasionally like to do.

So without further ado, here are three things I'm particularly fond of at the moment:

1. TapPath
Sometimes it's the simplest ideas that make the biggest impact. TapPath is a perfect example: The app, created by the same developer behind Link Bubble and Action Launcher, does one very focused but useful thing: It lets you expand and control what happens when you tap a link on your phone or tablet.

Normally, when you tap a link in a third-party app, the link opens in your default browser. With TapPath, you can specify different destinations that you can then trigger by single-tapping, double-tapping, or even triple-tapping any link from anywhere in the system.

Why bother, you might be wondering? Easy: It can save you time by giving you a powerful set of custom universal shortcuts. You might set a single-tap to open a link in your browser, for instance, a double-link to save it directly to Pocket, and a triple-link to open it with the system share picker so you can send it directly to any other destination. There are all sorts of possibilities.

TapPath isn't the kind of thing I'd recommend for a novice user, but for those of us who like to take full control of our phones, it's an incredibly handy tool to have.


2. Commandr
I've mentioned Commandr before, but it's cool enough to deserve a formal spot in this month's roundup. The app, which is free with an optional donation, makes your Android device's Voice Search function more powerful than ever.

All you do is set Commandr up on your phone or tablet, and it gives you a whole range of new voice command options -- you know, the things you can say after "Okay, Google" or after tapping the microphone icon that's part of Google Now. The commands work as if they were part of Android's native Voice Search system, too, so once the app is installed, you'll never actively think about it again.

Since I last discussed it, Commandr has grown to provide an even wider range of interesting possibilities. It could already do things like toggle your device's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or flashlight and control music playback by voice. Now it also gives you native-like voice commands for having your new Gmail messages read aloud, adjusting your device's volume, and controlling your camera.

Commandr can integrate with Tasker for even more advanced functionality, if you want. Its developer also adds new commands quite frequently, so the list of options is always expanding.

All in all, it's one of the most useful apps I've seen in some time and a prime example of how Android's flexibility can work for you.

3. SmugZei
You remember Muzei, right? It's the simple (and free) app by Android Developer Advocate Roman Nurik that changes your wallpaper to a new image every day.

I recently stumbled onto a great (and also free) extension for Muzei called SmugZei. It connects to an online photography gallery called SmugMug to pull in gorgeous photographs for your phone's background.

Muzei, SmugZei, SmugMug -- sounds like an awful lot of gibberish, I know. But forget about the silliness of the names and stick with me for a minute.

The reason this extension caught my eye is that some well-known photographers upload their images to SmugMug for anyone to enjoy. One of them is the talented Trey Ratcliff, whose images I've enjoyed via Google+ for quite a while.

With Muzei and SmugZei, I see a different one of Trey's gorgeous photos as my phone's wallpaper every day. I don't have to do anything; the app just automatically changes out the wallpaper to a new photo every several hours. It's a delightful surprise every time -- and it's really refreshing to have my home screen take on a different and equally beautiful look so often.

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