Blockchain technology has been generating excitement in the public and private sectors for the past several years for many reasons — a prominent one being support for self-executing contracts commonly referred to as smart contracts. But while smart contracts have the potential to streamline many business processes, full automation isn't likely anytime in the foreseeable future.

"Smart contracts are a combination of some certain binary actions that can be translated into code and some reference to plain language like we have today that is open to litigation if you mess up," says Antonis Papatsaras, CTO of enterprise content management company SpringCM, which specializes in contract workflow automation. "I think it's going to take forever."

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With mid-market companies feeling an increasing need to devote time and resources to network security, the security-as-a-service model is gaining traction, according to new research released yesterday by 451 Research.

"The security challenge for mid-tier businesses is multi-dimensional," Daniel Cummins, analyst at 451 Research, said in a statement. "For these businesses, everything seems to be increasing — attack frequency, compliance requirements, complexity, costs and the number of security products that need to be managed. Cloud-based security-as-a-service offers potentially significant advantages in terms of simplicity and access to security that may prove to be less complex and expensive than traditional approaches."

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Insurance companies are on the front lines when it comes to exposure to the financial risks of climate change. The internet of things (IoT) is shaping up to be a key component in mitigating those risks.

"Insurance companies rely upon historical loss records to guide their underwriting and set their prices," Washing Insurance Commission Mike Kreidler and California Insurance Commission Dave Jones wrote in the forward of Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey Report & Scorecard: 2016 Findings & Recommendations by nonprofit organization Ceres. "More and more frequently, the climate is behaving in ways that we can't predict. Weather patterns are shifting, and the severity and breadth of damage are intensifying, resulting in more costly disasters than we've ever seen. There is no basis in historical data for events like Hurricane Sandy, the Joplin, Missouri tornado, the Oso landslide in Washington state and record-breaking landslides in Western states. In 2016 alone, 31 major disaster declarations were reported to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by the end of August."

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If you're trying to do business intelligence (BI) on big data and the capability to handle large number of concurrent queries is a key issue for you, Google BigQuery may well be the way to go, according to a new Business Intelligence Benchmark released Thursday by AtScale, a startup specializing in helping organizations enable BI on big data.

[ Related: Google BigQuery update aims for enticing Hadoop users ]

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The modern enterprise is data-driven. The capability to quickly access and act upon information has become a key competitive advantage. But business data is often siloed and fragmented. To gain a competitive edge from your information, you need a single view of your data.

Most organizations today have a complicated process for managing their data, one that usually involves multiple data sources of variable structure, ingestion and transformation, loading into an operation database and supporting the business applications that need the data. Analytics, business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools require access to the data, which frequently requires a separate data warehouse or data lake. These layers all need to comply with security protocols, information governance standards and other operational requirements.

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Transporting freight operates at a massive scale in the U.S., most of it hauled by trucks that are the lifeblood of the American economy. But the trailers those trucks are hauling typically have a load efficiency of 70 to 75 percent, says Tom Bianculli, CTO of Zebra Technologies. The remaining 25 to 30 percent is air.

But smart environments powered by the internet of things (IoT) can change that, Bianculli says. Zebra's new SmartPack Trailer offering, announced at ProMat 2017 in Chicago today, uses sensors on the dock doors of distribution facilities, which peer into each trailer using a combination of 3D depth-sensing technology and a conventional megapixel camera.

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The information security threat landscape is constantly evolving. To help you navigate the terrain, each year the Information Security Forum (ISF) — a nonprofit association that researches and analyzes security and risk management issues on behalf of its members — puts out its Threat Horizon report to provide members with a forward-looking view of the biggest security threats over a two-year period. What follows are the nine biggest threats on the horizon through 2019 that your organization may have to manage and mitigate.

Theme 1: Disruption from an over-reliance on fragile connectivity

Organizations today depend of instant and uninterrupted connectivity, smart physical devices and trustworthy people. But that dependence makes them vulnerable to attacks on core internet infrastructure, devices used in daily business and key people with access to mission-critical information.

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Customer experience is the name of the game at Adobe Summit 2017 in Las Vegas this week. Today the company unveiled its new Experience Cloud offering, along with a new partnership with Microsoft aimed at creating a standard semantic data model for customer experience apps and services.

For years, digital marketers have measured digital interactions to gather customer data in an effort to optimize customer interactions in real-time by doing things like personalizing landing pages and targeting display ads. The new Adobe Experience Cloud brings together Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics Cloud in an effort to take the technology Adobe has developed for digital marketers and extend it to all the areas that touch on customer experience, like optimizing and personalizing customer support or building products.

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At Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, MapR Technologies took the wraps off a new small footprint edition of its Converged Data Platform geared for capturing, processing and analyzing data from internet of things (IoT) devices at the edge.

MapR Edge, designed to work in conjunction with the core MapR Converged Enterprise Edition, provides local processing, aggregation of insights at the core and the ability to then push intelligence back to the edge.

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