Participants are requested to choose their desired topic from the following list:
The combination of data streams and services created by digitizing everything creates four basic usage models — Manage, Monetize, Operate, and Extend. These four basic models can be applied to any of the four "Internets." Enterprises should not limit themselves to thinking that only the Internet of Things (assets and machines) has the potential to leverage these four models. For example, the pay-per-use model can be applied to assets (such as industrial equipment), services (such as pay-as-you-drive insurance), people (such as movers), places (such as parking spots), and systems (such as cloud services). Enterprises from all industries can leverage these four models.
Internet of Things and Big Data combining to have advanced, pervasive, and invisible data analytics will be needed to handle, manage, and contribute to Big Data. Its various analytics with real-time precision is more futuristic in the way businesses evolve and satisfy customer needs. Example: Connectivity of utility components and data analysis at source and heavier data-processing in the cloud.
The convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device. Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal and external applications will be built on this new style. In the near term, the focus for cloud/client will be on synchronizing content and applications across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices. In the future, games and enterprise applications alike will use multiple screens and exploit wearables and other devices to deliver an enhanced experience. Example: As the need for cloud based apps and services continues to grow, there will be a need for a development model for these applications and services, which will support the cloud based software development lifecycle.
With mobile phones becoming more powerful, there is increased emphasis on serving the needs as well as harnessing the power of the mobile user in diverse environments, as opposed to focusing on devices alone. For example, backend processing for data personalization and patternization, and use of these patterns to create more effective and efficient context sensitive information sharing for the end user’s benefit.
Ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive analytics will drive the development of systems that are alert to their surroundings and able to respond appropriately. Context-aware security is an early application of this new capability, but others will emerge. By understanding the context of a user request, applications can not only adjust their security response, but also adjust how information is delivered to the user, greatly simplifying an increasingly complex, computing world.
One of the top concerns expressed by IT managers in recent surveys regarding their reluctance to move business critical applications into a cloud environment was security. Most of the security concerns stemmed from external attacks such as malware, denial of service, and hacking. We are looking at submissions that attempt to solve these issues. Are there new threats on the horizon that might specifically target a cloud provider? How would you prevent them? You can also consider various scenarios like secure data for multitenancy, computation of encrypted data, etc.
Computer Scientists around the world are doing extensive research in different areas. Few of these technologies may emerge and change computing in the near future such as Intelligent Automation, Personas and and Context, Social Computing, Contextual Computing, and Augmented Reality. We are looking at submissions that come up with innovative ideas in these areas, addressing various aspects of implementation and usage.
The traditional approaches of relying on rule based SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems and people intensive security event monitoring are old fashioned, prone to human errors, and are not very effective in proactively addressing security risks.
The Next Gen SOC ( Security Operations Center) is about automating the bottom of the chain monitoring actions, so that security analysts are able to deliver valuable insights to the security posture of an organization, that are higher in the value chain (more analytics driven). The Next Gen SOC will cover Security Event Monitoring, Advanced Security Analytics and Threat Intelligence across and even outside the operating environment, Advanced Forensics capabilities, and a Mature Incident Response Process.
One can design, develop, and demonstrate a working POC of a Next Gen SOC using available tools and technologies. The demonstration should reflect benefits of automation on the people and process aspect of SOC management.
Overall POC should cover Threat Actors, Threat Vectors, Threat Monitoring, Advanced Event Analytics, Forensics, Threat Intelligence, and Incident Response Lifecycle. The POC should cover automated monitoring of events, usage of big data tools, approaches for advanced analytics, and feedback to the monitoring module. Machine Learning and predictive algorithms can be demonstrated to add weight to the Security Analytics module. Forensics should be supported by data visualization and drill-down capability tools that can be demonstrated by a Forensics process. Threat Intelligence module can be a hybrid, based on public sources of threat intel and human feedback based on the other modules. The incident response module can be demonstrated as a partially automated and a process driven approach to responding to security incidents reported from the SOC.
DevOps is the latest software industry practice that aims at establishing a culture and environment for building, testing and releasing software rapidly, frequently and more reliably. DevOps is considered as an emerging practice which is an intersection of traditional Development (Software Engineering), Software/IT Operations and Software Quality Assurance(QA).
Software industry is rapidly embracing DevOps to achieve Improved productivity/Improved customer experience/Improved quality and reduced risk of software delivery.
DevOps uses multiple tools required to code/build/test/package/release/configure/monitor software products and applications.
Open Source tools such as Docker (containerization), Jenkins (continuous Integration), Puppet (Infrastructure as Code) and Vagrant (virtualization platform) among many others are often used by DevOps practitioners..
Contestants can design, develop, and demonstrate a working POC of DevOps using available tools or build new tools to achieve DevOps practice. The demonstration should reflect benefits of DevOps on any one of the aspects such as code/build/test/package/release/configure/monitor software products and applications.