From Paris to Dubai, how can cities be more sustainable?

As we undergo the Fourth Industrial Revolution, companies are uniquely positioned to partner with governments to address some of the world's greatest challenges.

Urbanization continues to spread globally, with 70% of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2030. This trend brings with it the urgent need for more efficient use of energy, cleaner energy generation and cost effective energy storage. While the public sector must lead, it should work closely with the private sector to rapidly implement best practice policies, programs and projects that will improve urban efficiency and sustainability.

Buildings are responsible for up to a third of greenhouse gas emissions globally. The most cost-effective time to reduce energy consumption in buildings is before construction, as today’s integrated designs and off-the-shelf building technologies can yield up to a 50 percent reduction in energy use and positive returns on investments. For existing buildings, energy efficiency retrofits using these same principles can deliver 15-40 percent savings on energy costs, paying for themselves over time.

Best practices for improving building energy efficiency in cities include: 1) adopting and enforcing building codes and appliance standards; 2) setting reduction targets and adopting sustainable construction and leasing policies; 3) establishing retrofit programs for public and private sector buildings; 4) introducing certification, benchmarking and transparency programs; 5) accepting innovative financial models and programs; and 6) coordinating efforts with local utilities. While results are promising, very few cities globally have implemented a comprehensive set of these elements.

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EPUB Quality Checklist

This post is a list intended to serve as a starting point for the EPUB Quality Assurance process. Under each of the following sections, information about common best practices and suggestions for creating high-quality EPUB files are provided.

General
Metadata
Linking
Fonts
Cover Image
Copyright page
Table of Contents
Special Characters and Unicode
Page Numbers
Headings
Content Styling
Worksheets, Quizzes, etc.
Footnotes/Endnotes
Indexes
Other Back Matter
Back Cover
Images
Tables and Charts
Audio and Video Content
Interactivity

View the checklist

Systems Objective Scorecard

During the course of managing an IT department, it is important for IT management to understand areas of risks. There are standard best practices that can be engaged to score your department/organization. Below I (the author of the blog -- Arun Manansingh) have added some as a starting point. These are by no way complete.

Management and Planning
Physical and Logical Security
Applications Development and Maintenance
Infrastructures Operations and Maintenance

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Best practices for software license management

Software license management is the process that ensures that the legal agreements that come with procured software licenses are adhered to.In a basic sense, it ensures that only legally procured licenses are deployed on systems.

Organizations spend a fortune on licenses every year, and a lack of management around it can result in heavy fines. In some cases, CIOs of certain organizations have been taken into custody for violating norms.

This article, provides the basic concept of how software license management works along with a process map.

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9 popular IT security practices that just don't work

The security products and techniques you rely on most aren't keeping you as secure as you think.

When it comes to IT security, FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is more than just the tool of overhyping vendors hoping to sell their next big thing. It is the reality that seasoned IT security pros live in, thanks in large part to the -- at times gaping -- shortcomings of traditional approaches to securing IT systems and data.

The truth is most common IT security products and techniques don't work as advertised, leaving us far more exposed to malicious code than we know. That's because traditional IT security takes a whack-a-mole approach to threats, leaving us to catch up with the next wave of innovative malware, most of which rolls out in plain view on the Internet.

1: Your antivirus scanner won't uncover real network killers
2: Your firewalls provide little protection
3: Patching is no panacea
4: End-user education earns an F
5: Password strength won't save you
6: Intrusion detection systems can't determine intent
7: PKI is broken
8: Your appliances are an attacker's dream
9: Sandboxes provide straight line to underlying system

Read this interesting post