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Cloud Mobility,Others to Shape ICT in 2014 – Akano

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Tim Akano, chief executive officer, New Horizons Nigeria
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Tim Akano, Chief Executive Officer, New Horizons Nigeria over the weekend release his ICT predictions for 2014, chike onwuegbuchi was there and captured highlight of the predictions.

In 2014, we are going to divide our submission into 4 parts:  One, Seven Hottest skills that will prosper ICT professionals; two, seven biggest trends in ICT that will determine which organization survives, thrives or dies in 2014.

Three, seven most dangerous ICT Threats and four; How Nigeria and Nigerians can benefit from all of this. Some of the surveys conducted by IDC, Gartner, IDG, CIO magazine are quite useful as a guide for investors this year to know what is on the horizon.

Meanwhile in 2014, issues like e-waste will continue to dominate the technology discussion as this is predicted to grow by 33% in the next 3 years.( source: IDG) New Start-Ups will benefit from re-cycling businesses of telephone handsets, Laptops and PCs. Another issue is the mobile banking users. This is expected to grow by 100% this year. 

There will be new ways of watching Televisions. Another area of opportunities for entrepreneurs with foresight is MOBILE INSURANCE. Since we are now married to our gadgets, this will be a new source of investment for the Insurers.

ICT spending will grow by about 5% in the ‘’traditional market ‘’ of Europe and America while in the emerging markets , double digit growth is being expected to be led by China at 13%(  source: idc), Adoption of CYBER INSURANCE will witness double digit growth in 2014 in Europe and North America where awareness of Cyber threats  is huge.

In addition, this is a year of what I call ‘’TECHNOLOGY OVER FLOW’’ i.e. hardware will do more things than hitherto because it is now more intelligent and smarter. We will see new touch screen TVs and telephone handsets; smaller gadgets; good, functional and value-adding wearable technologies will flood the market, high performing sensors, automated homes, schools, intelligent automobiles, smart buildings among others are some of the innovative products that will be born which will excite and tickle consumers this year.

The 7 hottest ICT Skills Employers will Pay any Amount to Acquire in 2014
This is not going to be like any other year in the ICT industry both globally and locally. Most of the ICT skills that will benefit the unemployed , the youths, the old as well as the ICT Professionals who are desirous of promotion are truly new skills or hybrid of old and new.

BIG DATA ADMINSTRATOR (BDA) – Before 2014, what obtained was Data Administrator (DA). However due to the fact that the request for big data is skyrocketing- growing  by as much as 30 %,( source: idc) there will be issue around big data management. Demand is currently outpaces supply with regards to experts in this area.
Most of these data are coming from Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Jelly, LinkedIn and 3rd Parties etc which Marketing requires on hourly basis to study the ever changing consumer behavioral attitude and taste.
Currently, there is substantial growth in ‘’data-optimized cloud platform- leveraging high volume real time data streams according to Gartner. Packages like HADOOP and Big Data Analytics are in hot demand.
Data storage has become an issue and how to build redundancy into storage and make the data fit for efficient and effective storage and consumption is a challenge that a BDA will be employed to solve by major international Enterprise. 24% of companies’ survey said they will hire BDA professionals in 2014 (source: IDC)

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS:  With Big Data comes the biggest job of making sense out of all the mountain of information.
Volume of global data will expand to 35.2 zettabytes (idc) in two years time. 18% of companies’ survey by IDC submitted that they are looking for professionals with Business Intelligence skills to employ in 2014.  It is seen as the second most difficult skill to get competent hands. This is why they command very fat salary starting with six digits.
In 2014 if you are dam, dam good in analyzing, interpreting, and presenting the data in a meaningful way that will help the CEOs to take profitable decision, you are sure to prosper as IT Professional. The joker is to combine Business intelligent skills with Plex Systems plus ERP plus Project Management. You cannot be poor again with this combination- if you are sound at each of them!

DEVELOPER’S PROFESSIONALS WITH CLOUD MOBILITY SKILLS: These are the gurus who build and maintain cloud architecture. There is a paradigm shift right now from ‘’infrastructure as a service (Iaas) to platform as a service (Paas).
And this is expected to be a data-optimized platform as against generic platform. More data centers will be built in 2014.
The cloud spending is expected to grow to $100billion in 2014 ( source:idc). Cloud application will become mission critical.
We do not have enough expertise in this field anywhere in the world. Those who want to make good money in 2014 are advised to go for it!

LINUX PROFESSIONALS: This is an age of SINGULARITY where OPEN-SOURCE is the KING powered by LINUX and ANDROID.
Open source has now been finally accepted by countries and organization who need inexpensive and stable platform.
And this adoption and shift is phenomena. According to Jack Cullen, President of IT Staffing Firm called Modis: ‘’ if you are an IT Professional looking for long term career growth there is no  better place to be than working with open source’’. I strongly believe there are huge opportunities in Linux and Android skills in 2014.

VIRTULISATION EXPERTS: The art and science of commissioning, managing, and tearing down intelligent and virtual machines are now one of the fastest growing roles of date centers. Experts in virtualization will be in high demand this year.

IT UNTILITY MANAGER (ITUM): Everything in ICT is in a permanent state of flux- changing at the speed of light, getting more fragmented and sophisticated by the day. The CEOs don’t have time to keep pace with this dynamic industry.
And the resources to employ Consultant for each narrow, new segment are not available. Therefore, the CEOs are looking for the IT Utility Manager (ITUM) who has a holistic perspective of how technology works and communicates among one another.
The Manager who understands programming languages and how to connect them on different and competing platforms: desktop, laptop, mobile, cloud, etc.
He has skills in information security and Biometrics certifications and he can integrate all this with Social Technologies like facebook, Twitter, Jelly, LinkedIn etc.
This year, the role of biometrics in authentication will grow while the value of password will decrease.
Organizations will pay any amount of money for professionals who have deep understanding of biometrics authentication- facial, iris, fingers, voice, DNA, palm, pulse, in addition to the above skills. I call such a professional IT Utility Manager. This is a new role- which did not exist in 2013.

IT SECURITY, COMPLIANCE AND GOVERNANCE PROFESSIONALS: To prosper in 2014 as IT Security professional, one needs to combine it with compliance certifications like ISO, PCI/DSS, and Governance skills in risk Management.
Yes, security is like hunger in the stomach, it never goes away completely. It comes out in new dimension every day. However, most organizations are not interested in employing separate Manager for IT Security, Compliance and Governance.
They are all ‘’FIRST COUSINS’’ and they are safe to be warehoused in one room under one command. In 2013 IT Security was a big challenge. Most of the top global IT Companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and all suffered security breaches.  IT security breaches grew by 23% (IDC) in 2013.
In September 201 3, major US banks were hit with the largest denial of service (DoS) attacks in history. Also in October, South Carolina tax payer’s services were hacked compromising 3.6 million social security numbers.
In August, hackers broke into New York Times computer and stole passwords of high-profile Journalists and staff. This is why 21% of companies’ surveyed said they would hire the guy with the right skill-set in IT Security, Compliance and Governance.
International certifications like EC-Council CEH, CHFI, Encryption, ECSA, CISSP Risk Management, etc will sell like hot potatoes.
This is why Safenet encryption is growing like bush fire in the harmattan, being acknowledge by Gartner as the best in the Encryption space.
More so, most of the things we predicted came to pass in 2013. Then, in 2012 based on the trends which we observed on the horizons in the ICT industry globally and locally, we came to certain conclusions in specific sectors like MOBILITY, Training, and Security etc.
One, that OPEN-SOURCE via Android and Linux will rule the Smartphone and personal computers. Today Android’s share of the Smartphone operating system stands at over 75%. We saw that because Apple is a ‘’closed system’’, and with high price tag vis-à-vis competition, that it would lose market share: that happened until it came out with an ‘economy iPhone’.
We saw then that competition was about to throw Blackberry ‘under the bus’ as a punishment for its sluggishness in innovation.
With Blackberry recent mountain of looses of  $4.4billion, it is a matter of time, if nothing urgent, radical and concrete is done before the  bus will crush the most successful Canadian mobile telephone giant, which used to be the darling of youths and the Military globally.  As we predicted, IT security breaches skyrocketed.
As we predicted, the seven IT skills that we submitted would blossom, actually did, and smart guys who took practical steps to acquire those skills really prospered in 2013.


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AI Slows Down some Experienced Software Developers, Study Finds

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Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found.

AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study, on a group of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.

Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.

The study’s lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected “a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously.”

The findings challenge the belief that AI always makes expensive human engineers much more productive, a factor that has attracted substantial investment into companies selling AI products to aid software development.

AI is also expected to replace entry-level coding positions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.

Prior literature on productivity improvements has found significant gains: one study found using AI sped up coders by 56%, another study found developers were able to complete 26% more tasks in a given time.

But the new METR study shows that those gains don’t apply to all software development scenarios. In particular, this study showed that experienced developers intimately familiar with the quirks and requirements of large, established open source codebases experienced a slowdown.

Other studies often rely on software development benchmarks for AI, which sometimes misrepresent real-world tasks, the study’s authors said.

The slowdown stemmed from developers needing to spend time going over and correcting what the AI models suggested.

“When we watched the videos, we found that the AIs made some suggestions about their work, and the suggestions were often directionally correct, but not exactly what’s needed,” Becker said.

The authors cautioned that they do not expect the slowdown to apply in other scenarios, such as for junior engineers or engineers working in codebases they aren’t familiar with.

Still, the majority of the study’s participants, as well as the study’s authors, continue to use Cursor today.

The authors believe it is because AI makes the development experience easier, and in turn, more pleasant, akin to editing an essay instead of staring at a blank page.

“Developers have goals other than completing the task as soon as possible,” Becker said. “So they’re going with this less effortful route.”

 


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Firm Uncovers $500K Crypto Heist Through Malicious Packages

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Kaspersky GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team) experts have discovered open-source packages that download the Quasar backdoor and a stealer designed to exfiltrate cryptocurrency. The malicious packages are intended for the Cursor AI development environment, which is based on Visual Studio Code — a tool used for AI-assisted coding.

The malicious open-source packages are extensions hosted in the Open VSX repository that claim to provide support for the Solidity programming language. However, in practice, they download and execute malicious code on users’ devices.

During an incident response, a blockchain developer from Russia reached out to Kaspersky after installing one of these fake extensions on his computer, which allowed attackers to steal approximately $500,000 worth of crypto assets.

The threat actor behind these packages managed to deceive the developer by making the malicious package rank higher than the legitimate one. The attacker achieved this by artificially inflating the malicious package’s downloads count to 54,000.

After installation, the victim gained no actual functionality from the extension. Instead, malicious ScreenConnect software was installed on the computer, granting threat actors remote access to the infected device.

Using this access, they deployed the open-source Quasar backdoor along with a stealer that collects data from browsers, email clients, and crypto wallets. With these tools, the threat actors were able to obtain the developer’s wallet seed phrases and subsequently steal cryptocurrency from the accounts.

After the malicious extension downloaded by the developer was discovered and removed from the repository, the threat actor republished it and artificially inflated its installation count to a higher number – 2 million, compared to 61,000 for the legitimate package. The extension was removed from the platform following a request from Kaspersky.

“Spotting compromised open-source packages with the naked eye is becoming increasingly difficult. Threat actors are using increasingly creative tactics to deceive potential victims, even developers who have a strong understanding of cybersecurity risks — particularly those working in the blockchain development field.

As we expect adversaries to continue targeting developers, it is recommended that even experienced IT professionals deploy dedicated security solutions to safeguard sensitive data and prevent financial losses,” commented Georgy Kucherin, Security Researcher with Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team.

The threat actor behind the attack published not only malicious Solidity extensions but also another NPM package, solsafe, which also downloads ScreenConnect. A few months earlier, three additional malicious Visual Studio Code extensions were released — solaibot, among-eth, and blankebesxstnion — all of them have already been removed from the repository.


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NITDA Reaffirms Commitment to 95% Digital Literacy by 2030, as UBEC Pledges Collaboration

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DG NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa CCIE (left), receiving an award for an Ambassador of Basic Education from the ES UBEC, Hajia Aisha Garba (right)
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Kashifu Inuwa CCIE, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has reaffirmed the Federal Government’s unwavering commitment to achieving 95% digital literacy across Nigeria by the year 2030, with an ambitious milestone of 70% by 2027.

This disclosure was made in total alignment with the present administration’s priority areas of reforming the economy for sustained inclusive growth and accelerating diversification through industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation.

Making this known during a collaborative meeting hosted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Inuwa highlighted the government’s strategic prioritisation of human capital development as central to its national transformation agenda.

“We started this journey in 2023 when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came on board and he made it clear that economic diversification and inclusivity are part of the administration’s agenda,” he noted.

“And the president outlined this in 8 priority areas to achieve the vision, with priority number 7 specifically focused on accelerating industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation,” he added.

Recognising the importance of digital fluency in achieving this agenda, he stated that NITDA is committed to investing in the digital empowerment of citizens through the development of the National Digital Literacy Framework (NDLF), a strategic blueprint aligned with international best practices.

He added that to tailor the framework to Nigeria’s specific needs, 6 core competency areas were incorporated to include device and software operations, information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, content creation, safety, and problem solving.

He explained that the framework would address all levels of digital fluency, from basic, intermediate to advanced levels, to make digital skills accessible to every Nigerian, from primary school pupils to working professionals.

According to Inuwa, despite data limitations, NITDA estimates that Nigeria’s digital literacy rate currently stands at 50%, up from 44% in 2021, based on extrapolations from the World Bank’s Better Life Report.

The NITDA DG disclosed that the agency has been working closely with the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) in developing a curriculum for digital literacy, which can be infused into formal education. Stating that the visit is a continuation of NITDA’s ongoing engagements with key education stakeholders, including the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), and the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), all aimed at advancing digital literacy across all levels of learning.

Inuwa also revealed ongoing collaborations with global platforms such as Coursera to train teachers using AI-powered lesson generation tools and provide scalable online training.

It is worth recalling that late last year, NITDA partnered with the Nasarawa State University in collaboration with CISCO in launching the Digital Learning for NSUK (DL4NSUK) initiative to enhance digital literacy in tertiary institutions, and equipping graduates with the skills needed to be digitally proficient and globally competitive.

While stressing that the entire process, from curriculum development to classroom delivery, would require a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, Inuwa said, “This is not a journey we can walk alone; we must bring everyone on board, education stakeholders, technology providers, state governments, and international partners.”

In response to the DG’s remarks, UBEC Executive Secretary, Hajiya Aisha Garba, confirmed that the Commission has officially received the digital literacy curriculum developed by NITDA and NERDC and has commenced internal review processes.

She acknowledged the curriculum as robust and forward-looking but stressed the need for simplification to suit early learners and teachers, citing challenges such as curriculum overload, limited teacher capacity, and inadequate infrastructure as key barriers to effective implementation.

She pledged that UBEC, in partnership with the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), will lead efforts to equip schools with computers and solar-powered infrastructure to support real learning.

“We’re committed to working with NITDA and NERDC to refine the curriculum, train teachers, and ensure effective delivery. Let us align the technical vision with grassroots realities to make a lasting impact,” she concluded.

To formalise the implementation of the meeting’s resolutions, a joint inter-agency committee was established to develop strategic plans that will ensure the effective rollout of the digital literacy initiative, to equip young Nigerians with the essential digital skills required to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and technology-driven global landscape.


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