Author Archives: Mary Branscombe

Machine learning is transforming business. But even as the technology advances, companies still struggle to take advantage of it, largely because they don’t understand how to strategically implement machine learning in service of business goals. Hype hasn’t helped, sowing confusion over what exactly machine learning is, how well it works and what it can do for your company.

Here, we provide a clear-eyed look at what machine learning is and how it can be used today.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that enables systems to learn and predict outcomes without explicit programming. It is often used interchangeably with the term AI because it is the AI technique that has made the greatest impact in the real world to date, and it’s what you’re most likely to use in your business. Chatbots, product recommendations, spam filters, self-driving cars and a huge range of other systems leverage machine learning, as do “intelligent agents” like Siri and Cortana.

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Do you change processes after handling an incident, or do you just carry on and wait for the next problem? Instead of dealing with individual failures, think about creating a culture in your IT department that can not only handle problems but truly learn from them.

Cloud providers are routinely better at learning from failure than most enterprises — because they have to be. It’s critical that they are transparent about failures to keep the trust of their customers, but it also hits the bottom line if they take too long to solve problems. When AWS, Google, Azure or GitHub has a major outage, you’ll see regular updates, and once the problem has been fixed, a public incident response will cover what changes are being made to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

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Businesses like Netflix and Uber are often touted as ‘cloud native’ businesses, without the disadvantages of legacy enterprise IT to hold them back from taking advantage of SaaS and PaaS, microservices and mobile apps. And Aaron Levie, CEO of file sharing service Box, says that Netflix “had time to become an end-to-end business and to create its own content, because it was digital from the ground up.”

Getting your own sustainable digital business model, though, takes far more than just having a web site for customers or some mobile apps for employees. “An app is just a manifestation of the digital process and if the underlying process hasn’t been digitized an app doesn’t change that,” Levie says. “Your whole company has to operate like a digital business. The only way you can deliver a digital business model is by having a digital operating model. That doesn’t mean that everything goes digital but it does mean that the operating model goes digital.”

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Last year Microsoft added an unusual new feature to Windows 10: Linux support. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) — sometimes called Bash on Windows — is “Microsoft’s implementation of a Linux-compatible infrastructure that runs atop and within the Windows kernel,” senior program manager Rich Turner tells CIO.com. That means running Linux binaries without leaving Windows.

“Bash on Windows offers a toolset for developers, IT administrators and other tech professionals that want or need to run Linux command-line tools alongside their Windows tools and applications,” Turner explains. Developed with the help of Canonical (and a large community of Linux users), it’s not there to turn Linux into Windows, or Windows into Linux. It’s just that some Linux tools are so ubiquitous for development and deployment that it’s useful to be able to use them without spinning up a virtual machine (VM). That’s one of the reasons Macs are so popular with developers: MacOS is based on BSD, which is UNIX, so it can run Linux tools like Bash. And now, so can Windows 10.

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Microsoft’s Office applications haven’t changed much over the past 25 years. Indeed, a time-traveller from 1992 who knew how to use Word 5.5 for DOS or Mac System 7 would have to get used only to the tools moving from vertical menus to the horizontal ribbon.  

Yes, Microsoft successfully brought Office back to the Mac after years of neglect. It also used the acquisition of Accompli and Sunrise to quickly get high-quality email and calendar apps onto iOS and Android — those teams are revitalizing the Outlook applications on PC and Mac, and the new To Do service is trying to do the same thing, based on the popular Wunderlist app. Yes, there are some clever new tools in Word and PowerPoint that use machine learning to improve spell checking and automate slide design, and the monthly updates keep adding more features. And, yes, the hidden gem that is OneNote is finally getting significant investment to make the note-taking tool more useful on more platforms.

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In 2015, Gartner predicted that 50 percent of enterprises would start their Windows 10 deployments by January 2017. A Spiceworks survey of IT pros agreed: 40 of respondents said they would start migrating to Windows 10 by the middle of 2016, and 73 percent said their organizations would roll out Windows 10 by July 2017. A follow-up survey found that prediction was fairly accurate: 38 percent of organizations had already adopted Windows 10 by July 2016, most of them larger businesses.

And in October 2016, CCS Insight’s decision maker survey showed “strong anticipated adoption of Windows 10 this year and beyond,” vice president for enterprise research Nick McQuire tells CIO. Forty-seven percent of organizations surveyed planned to upgrade to Windows 10 by the end of 2017, with 86 percent saying they’d migrate within three to four years. He estimates there are already some 24 million Windows 10 enterprise machines in production.

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Running your own email servers doesn’t do anything to differentiate your business from the competition (except in a bad way, if you get hacked). But avoiding the effort of managing and monitoring your own mail server isn’t the only advantage of a cloud service. The scale of a cloud mail provider like Office 365 means that malware and phishing attacks are easier to spot — and the protections extend beyond your inbox.

Email protection isn’t just about blocking spam anymore. It’s about blocking malicious messages aimed at infecting computers and stealing credentials. Traditional antivirus scanning isn’t the solution either, because attachments aren’t just executable files you can recognize with a signature. Often, scammers use JavaScript and macros (including PowerShell) to trigger a secondary download with the malicious payload. And embedded links often go to legitimate but compromised sites, so you also can’t rely on site reputation.

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