“These functions normally take hundreds of man hours,” the Department of Defense noted in a statement. “The entire cost of the Hack the Pentagon pilot was $150,000, with about half going to the hackers themselves.”

READ MORE: Department of Defense Updates Cloud Security Requirements Guide

Not a bad return on investment, apparently, and it’s a strategy the DoD plans to expand on in the future.

“The U.S. Government is constantly under attack by hackers, and DoD is no exception. DoD information and networks have been compromised in the past through unpatched or unknown vulnerabilities in websites,” the department’s report noted. “We believe the concept will be successful when applied to many or all of DoD’s other security challenges. That’s why starting this month DoD is embarking on three follow-on initiatives.”

Those initiatives include:

• Developing a responsible disclosure policy, so that in the future attackers can report security flaws “without fear of prosecution.”
• Expanding bug bounty programs to other components in an ongoing way.
• Provide incentives for contractors to use bug bounties and code review processes to root out security problems before deployment.

With over 1,819 vulnerability reports (the 138 referenced above were the validated ones), the Pentagon seems pleased with the results.

“DoD will capitalize on its success and continue to evolve the way we secure DoD networks, systems, and information,” the agency stated.

Source: TheWHIR

“We all get together once a week, we share and discuss and debate,” she said. “It wasn’t possible before I came because sales and marketing were in a different division than cloud. And cloud was in a different division than Apps. I feel like the structure is in place now and we’re hiring very aggressively.”

SEE ALSO: Diane Greene: Google is “Dead Serious” about Enterprise Cloud

Key to that shift has been understanding the transforming relationship between vendor and customer: For many of Google’s clients, they come not just for the pure power, but also the expertise in how to build and sell cloud services of their own.

Greene highlighted Google’s deal with Land O’Lakes:

It took crop and weather data from Google and worked with Google to build an app hosted on Google’s cloud. The app helps its farm and dairy co-op members improve their crop yields.

“It’s fun for us to help them do that,” she says. Unlike the old days, where an IT company would be the one to build the app and sell it to agriculture companies, “we don’t have to do it ourselves.”

Greene also said that the industry, particularly Amazon’s AWS, has been following Google’s aggressive price cuts, good news for Google and customers, and signs that the war for cloud supremacy is only heating up.

Source: TheWHIR

Hoffman sat down for a great interview with Backchannel to discuss his plans, and speculated (a little bit) on what LinkedIn would look like in a decade.

“Let’s just focus on artificial intelligence. What if we could offer every member a personal assistant for their career? Members could ask: what are the skills that are going to be really important to me in three to five years? What is the best way to develop those?” he told Backchannel. “Which courses both here and across the internet would be the right ones to do? Which would be the people in my network at one, two and three degrees that I should connect with? Which LinkedIn groups are the most valuable for doing that?”

He said that while LinkedIn those kinds of discussions were hypothetical looks at the future, at Microsoft they become something they can work for in the near-term, based on both the technologies and platforms Microsoft already has. Hoffman even admitted that, from the beginning, one of the dreams LinkedIn had was integration across Outlook. Now that dream is a lot closer to reality.

Original article appeared here: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman plans to take on larger role in Microsoft

Source: TheWHIR

Solair also worked hard to take data from the field and bring it back into central engineering offices, helping make sure that products were working as expected after they shipped.

Now Microsoft will be putting that know-how to work directly: In a blog post, Sam George, partner director of Azure IoT at Microsoft, pointed to Solair integrations in everything from factory lines to espresso machines as the kind of work that attracted Microsoft the company.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Solair, an Italian company that has been delivering innovative Internet of Things (IoT) services to customers across a number of industries, including manufacturing, retail, food & beverage and transportation,he wrote.The integration of Solair’s technology into the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite will continue to enhance our complete IoT offering for the enterprise.”

Original article appeared here: Microsoft just acquired an Italian firm to help it stitch together the Internet of Things

Source: TheWHIR