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Information Technology
The Information Technology Department is responsible for the governance of the Bank’s information systems and the strategic use of information, communication and network technology.
The Information Technology Department ensures that the efficiency and effectiveness of the Bank’s functions and operations is enhanced through the strategic use of information technology.
The Information Technology Department performs these core functions:
- Introduces and maintains computerized information systems to process data efficiently to produce useful and timely information
- Provides the appropriate hardware, software, networking and communications infrastructure for automation
- Provides the highest level of data security, confidentiality and integrity
- Ensures a safe and reliable computing environment
- Provides a high degree of availability and recovery of its systems
The runtime for Windows Forms, Microsoft’s UI framework for building Windows desktop applications, was spruced up with the recent release of .NET 6.0, although high-DPI and scaling issues remain to be resolved for the application.
In a bulletin on Windows Forms improvements published November 16, Microsoft said it had been working through the “high DPI space” trying to get Windows Forms applications to properly support PerMonitorV2 mode, a DPI awareness mode that allows applications to immediately render correctly whenever the DPI changes.
Agile programming is the most-used methodology that enables development teams to release their software into production, frequently to gather feedback and refine the underlying requirements. For agile to work in practice, however, processes are needed that allow the revised application to be built and released into production automatically—generally known as continuous integration/continuous deployment, or CI/CD. CI/CD enables software teams to build complex applications without running the risk of missing the initial requirements by regularly involving the actual users and iteratively incorporating their feedback.
According to this recent report from Skillsoft, the expanding skills gap will continue to create the most issues during this time of rapid technological change, combined with the intense pressure on IT teams to deliver innovative solutions. The Skillsoft report reveals that 38% of IT decision-makers said that the rate of technological change outpaces their existing skills inventory. In other words, they want to be innovative to capture more market share, but they lack the right in-house skills to pull it off. About one-third of survey respondents (35%) also reported that this problem is compounded by their inability to attract qualified candidates.
If you analyze data in R and share information via Microsoft 365, I have good news: There is an easy way to connect R with Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The Microsoft365R R package, developed by the Microsoft Azure team, includes functions to work with Microsoft 365 APIs from R.
Here we’ll walk through how to send Outlook email and Teams messages with R.
Microsoft365R is available on CRAN, so you can install it with install.packages("Microsoft365R").
Can you trust the public cloud? The answer, of course, is yes. The public cloud is, in many ways, safer than your own data center.
But doesn’t the fact that multiple customers share the same physical hardware create a safety concern? Isn’t any multitenant system inherently less secure?
What is multitenancy?First, we should discuss what we mean by multitenant environments and what we mean by single-tenant environments. As you might suspect, the answer is not as clear-cut as it might seem.
We really need to stop it with posts intended to proffer the secret to open source success (TL;DR be like Confluent). It turns out that market dynamics determine the right model for a given company. The industry wasted a decade trying to ape the Red Hat model. It didn’t work. As Peter Levine, general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote back in 2014, there will never be another Red Hat. If he were to write that post today, he might also argue that there will never be another Confluent.
In light of two recent security incidents impacting the popular NPM registry for JavaScript packages, GitHub will require 2FA (two-factor authentication) for maintainers and admins of popular packages on NPM.
The 2FA policy, intended to protect against account takeovers, will be put in place starting with a cohort of top packages in the first quarter of 2022, GitHub said in a bulletin published on November 15. GitHub became stewards of the registry after acquiring NPM in 2020.
Kotlin 1.6.0, the latest release of JetBrains’ trendy language for JVM, web, and mobile development, has been released with a new memory manager for native development, still in an experimental phase.
The memory manager for Kotlin/Native, which compiles code to native binaries, brings the language closer to providing a consistent development experience. The memory manager lifts existing restrictions on object sharing between threads and offers leak-free, concurrent programming primitives that are safe and do not require special management or annotations.
Valtix recently released research that multicloud will be a strategic priority in 2022, according to the vast majority of more than 200 IT leaders in the United States who participated in the study. Security is top of mind, with only 54% saying they are highly confident they have the tools or skills to pull off multicloud security, and 51% saying they have resisted moving to multiple clouds because of the added security complexities.
If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I have long identified complexity as the No. 1 inhibitor of multicloud success, with operational and security limitations as the cause of excess complexity. This is largely because of a lack of holistic planning and migration, and development projects running without any notion of cross-cloud services, such as security, operations, and governance.
Cryptography grows ever more prominent in our lives. Every time you log into an app or send an email, you are relying on an ingenious cryptographic infrastructure that is descended largely from breakthroughs in the 1970s.
Beyond just specialist software developers, beyond just coders, even the non-programming general public can benefit from understanding how cryptography works, especially in an age of crypto currency and crypto investment.
All of us use cryptography in our daily lives, whether we know it or not.
[ Also on InfoWorld: The best open source software of 2021 ] What is cryptography?Cryptography is the practice of securing communications. This is achieved using a variety of techniques that boil down to implementing protocols that prevent unwelcome parties from viewing or altering data.
Recently, the Apache Kylin community released a major update with the general availability of Kylin 4. Kylin 4 continues the mission to provide a unified, high-performance, cloud-friendly, open source OLAP (online analytical processing) platform. Kylin 4 upgrades the Kylin architecture to make it easy to deploy and scale in the cloud. The new release features three major platform updates and myriad other improvements.
First, Kylin 4 replaces its previous HBase storage engine with Apache Parquet, making it possible to decouple compute and storage for unlimited independent scalability. Second, Kylin 4 unifies the compute engine and removes any previous dependencies on the Hadoop ecosystem. This makes resource allocation much more flexible, resulting in a significant reduction in total cloud resource usage and associated costs. Third, by introducing a brand new, fully distributed query engine, Kylin 4 makes cubing duration and query latency much more performant compared to previous releases.
Virtual threads are being proposed for Java, in an effort to dramatically reduce the effort required to write, maintain, and observe high-throughput concurrent applications.
A draft JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) from Oracle, filed this week, calls for a preview of virtual threads as part of the standard edition of Java. Virtual threads would supplement Java’s platform threads, which represent operating system threads, with a lightweight user-mode thread implementation that would make more efficient use of available hardware, with dramatically reduced costs.
[ Also on InfoWorld: JDK 18: What to expect in Java 18 ]Threads, the proposal notes, are useful for representing a unit of concurrency, such as a transaction. Java’s current implementation of Thread consumes an OS thread for each Java thread, and OS threads are scarce and costly. A modern server can handle orders of magnitude more concurrent transactions than OS threads.
For software developers who primarily build their applications as a set of microservices deployed using containers and orchestrated with Kubernetes, a whole new set of security considerations has emerged beyond the build phase.
Unlike hardening a cluster, defending at run time in containerized environments has to be dynamic: constantly scanning for unexpected behaviors within a container after it goes into production, such as connecting to an unexpected resource or creating a new network socket.
At its recent Ignite event, Microsoft unveiled a new Office application: Loop. Built on its long-promised real-time Fluid Framework collaboration platform, Loop is a canvas that hosts components for shared work, providing a place to keep all the various pieces of a team’s project together.
You could consider Loop to be the spiritual successor to one-time Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s work on Notes and Groove. Loop mixes documents, editing tools, and conversations so a team can construct documents while managing discussions around the content. It builds on the micro-work concepts we’re seeing in tools such as Teams, breaking down units of work and collaboration into components that can be inserted into Loop documents.
Developer productivity is returning to pre-pandemic levels, but the workplace itself is shifting, GitHub has revealed in recent research.
In GitHub’s “2021 State of the Octoverse” research, the company observes that pull requests this year were merged fastest at work, almost twice as fast as for open source projects. The research also showed that pull requests at work were merged 25 percent slower than last year.
[ Also on InfoWorld: 6 Git mistakes you will make—and how to fix them ]However, when comparing the previous two years, GitHub sees signs that work rhythm is returning to pre-pandemic levels. GitHub also found that 46 percent of developers who worked collocated with teammates now expect to work fully remotely or in a hybrid environment. Only 11 percent expect to go back to working collocated.
In 2013, Docker was the “it” company. Docker made headlines for the critical role it played in bringing containers to the mainstream, and in many ways displaced PaaS as the hotness of the time (Heroku anyone?). Now, the company is back in the press with the introduction of a new model for Docker Desktop that requires larger organizations to buy a paid subscription for the tools. There’s been a vocal reaction to this announcement, one that reminds me of the important role Docker played in popularizing a model we know, love, and now use on a mainstream basis: containers.
The roadmap for Kotlin, JetBrains’ programming language for JVM, JavaScript, and Android development, has been updated to reflect the project’s advancements in areas such as the compiler and mobile functionality.
Plans for Kotlin 1.7.0 and beyond were detailed in a bulletin published by JetBrains on November 10. Kotlin 1.5.31 is the latest version available, as of November 15.
[ Also on InfoWorld: JDK 18: What to expect in Java 18 ]JetBrains said the focus of the compiler work was on bringing the K2 compiler front end to an alpha state. K2 promises to be a speedier compiler for the language, with the front end responsible for code analysis and transformation to an intermediate representation.
Let’s say you’re the owner of a tire manufacturing company that’s been in business for more than 70 years. You have some great proprietary logistics systems you’ve used for decades and systems that are famous for optimizing the supply chain that contributes to manufactured goods in your vertical market. It would be beneficial to your customers and even your competitors to use your logistics systems in their own internal systems. For your business, the new revenue streams would far outweigh any competitive disadvantages that might arise from monetizing this aspect of your company’s proprietary assets.
When this type of opportunity presents itself, many enterprises look at the competitive implications and take a hard pass. At the same time, they recognize that most businesses don’t want to recreate the wheel when a well-known wheel manufacturer can provide a key piece of the knowledge pie for a nominal fee. If all goes as planned, the well-known wheel manufacturer’s own systems improve because of expanded usage, its revenue stream diversifies, and the company gains as much or more competitive knowledge as it releases.
According to two recent Gartner reports, 85% of AI and machine learning projects fail to deliver, and only 53% of projects make it from prototypes to production. Yet the same reports indicate little sign of a slowdown in AI investments. Many organizations plan to increase these investments.
Many of these failures are avoidable with a little common-sense business thinking. The drivers to invest are powerful: FOMO (fear of missing out), a frothy VC investment bubble in AI companies with big marketing budgets, and, to some extent, a recognition of the genuine need to harness AI-driven decision-making and move toward a data-driven enterprise.
[ Also on InfoWorld: 3 enterprise AI success stories ]Instead of thinking of an AI or machine learning project as a one-shot wonder, like upgrading a database or adopting a new CRM system, it’s best to think of AI as an old-fashioned capital investment, similar to how a manufacturer would justify the acquisition of an expensive machine.
Many organizations follow devops principles and want to transform into devops cultures. Some of the key practices include version control, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), applying machine learning in operations (AIops), and continuous testing. More advanced teams also focus on continuous planning, architecting cloud-native applications, developing microservices, controlling code with feature flags, promoting shift-left security practices, establishing service-level objectives, managing error budgets, and becoming more data driven.
Open source isn’t supposed to work like this. Like Elasticsearch, that is. A few years ago AWS called out Elastic for shifting away from Elasticsearch’s Apache-style permissive licensing to “some rights reserved” licensing. By early 2021, Elastic went farther down its licensing path, and AWS responded by forking Elasticsearch, resulting in OpenSearch. Along the way, OpenSearch has picked up some open source adherents such as Instaclustr and Aiven, which have both built managed services for OpenSearch. Meanwhile, a chorus of industry voices beyond AWS has criticized Elastic for how it has handled licensing (see this tweet and this one).
Deno 1.16, the latest version of the JavaScript/TypeScript runtime, features support for a new JSX transform and WebAssembly reference types.
The newly supported JSX transform, which is featured in the React 17 JavaScript UI library, both improves the JSX transform API and allows automatic importing of the JSX runtime library. JSX is a syntax extension for JavaScript that is often used to describe what the UI should look like.
[ Also on InfoWorld: The best open source software of 2021 ]Deno 1.16 also adds an experimental API for listening to operating system signals. The new unstable API supersedes the existing Deno.signals API, which also was unstable. Other new features and improvements in Deno 1.16:
Visual Studio Code 1.62, the latest monthly release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, is available with capabilities centering on areas such as the workbench and search icons.
Published November 4, Visual Studio Code 1.62, aka the October 2021 release, is available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac at the project website. The new features in Visual Studio 1.62 include:
- Accessibility improvements to the Settings editor include the editor scrolling back to the top after performing a search, so the user does not end up midway through search results and after each search. Also, more UI elements within the Settings editor have the setting ID as their name.
- Updates to search icons have been made so that they are now the same weight, while the match word icon is now more distinguishable from others.
- The parameter in the parameter hint is now highlighted and the color can be themed via editorHoverWidget.highlightForeground.
- Bracket pair guides have been improved, with horizontal lines now outlining the scope of a bracket pair. Vertical lines now depend on indentation of the code surrounded by the bracket pair. Further, bracket pairs now can be configured for a specific programming language through settings.
- Developers can choose between displaying IntelliSense hovers above or below the current line.
- Developers can configure how HTML atrributes are completed, via a html.completion.attributeDefaultValue setting.
- The editor now renders Unicode directional formatting by default.
- The editor now shows if the domains of an extension publisher are verified by Visual Studio Marketplace.
- TypeScript 4.5 support is previewed.
- Work continues on making the Visual Studio Code workbench ready for enabling Electron process sandboxing. Visual Studio Code leverages GitHub’s Electron framework for writing cross-platform applications. With Visual Studio Code 1.62, efforts were made to move Node.js file services out of the workbench window and into a different process. The same was done for the file watcher, which no longer forks from the workbench window but from a different background process.
- Two subsequent updates have been made to Visual Studio Code 1.62. Version 1.62.1 addresses a security issue pertaining to the use of a command-line flag with ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE, and version 1.62.2 addresses a number of issues pertaining to semantic highlighting, notebooks, and other features.
Visual Studio Code 1.62 also features a preview of Visual Studio Code for the Web, a zero-install experience running in the browser. The predecessor Visual Studio Code 1.6.1 was released last month.
The advanced features of public cloud providers’ native services offer clear benefits. Most enterprises now exploit cloud-native patterns in developing new applications, even in the augmentation of migrated applications. However, most enterprises would like to minimize lock-in to specific cloud service providers. Guess what? When you leverage a cloud provider’s native services, those services are not transportable across clouds.
This makes it obvious why containers have become a megatrend.
[ Also on InfoWorld: Your Linux container and Kubernetes forecast for 2021 ]IT typically considers containers a good idea because everyone is using them, and it’s good to follow the crowd that’s also creating a development ecosystem. Also, containers can scale by using cluster managers and orchestration services, such as Kubernetes.
Svelte and its full-stack framework, SvelteKit, have made a splash and won applause, including a recent Best of Open Source Software Award, by thinking outside the box in their approach to JavaScript development.
I recently had a chance to talk with Rich Harris, creator of Svelte, about front-end JavaScript trends and the road ahead for Svelte. We also discussed multi-page apps vs. single-page apps, apps vs. docs, his concept of the “transitional app,” and running an open source software project, among other things.
[ Also on InfoWorld: The best open source software of 2021 ]Matthew Tyson: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk. You work at the New York Times. Do you live in NYC?
Dependency injection is a technique that allows you to inject the dependent objects of a particular class rather than create those instances directly. Using dependency injection enhances testability and maintenance by facilitating loose coupling. Additionally, dependency injection allows you to modify your implementations without having to change the dependent types that rely on them.
Dependency injection is a first-class citizen in ASP.NET Core. The built-in dependency injection provider in ASP.NET Core is not as feature-rich as IoC (inversion of control) containers such as StructureMap and Ninject, but it is fast, easy to configure, and easy to use. You can inject both framework services and application services in ASP.NET Core.
Ruby, the popular dynamic programming language that is now more than a quarter-century old, is set to add a performance-boosting, just-in-time compiler with the planned 3.1.0 version.
Now in an initial preview as of November 9, Ruby 3.1.0 is downloadable from the project website. Ruby 3.1.0 integrates YJIT (Yet Another Ruby JIT), an in-process JIT compiler developed by Shopify. YJIT still is an experimental feature.
C# 10, the latest release of Microsoft’s object-oriented, type-safe programming language for the .NET platform, has arrived, with capabilities intended to make code “prettier,” quicker, and more expressive, the company said.
The upgrade to C# is part of the .NET 6 software development framework and Visual Studio 2022 IDE, both of which were published as production releases on November 8.
[ Also on InfoWorld: What’s new in Microsoft .NET 6 ]New features and improvements in C# 10 include the following:
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