Phil Roy From CSU - Guest Speaker
Today's Guest Speaker, Phil Roy was intoduced by Craig Bromley.
Phil is a director of systems and applications at CSU. There are some 230 applications that the crew at CSU manages.
The theme of his talk was that the rate of change was increasing and that technology was rapidly becoming both necessary and accepted in the community. There is disruption ahead! There are complete changes coming in the way we use technology, and its effect on current businessses will be profound. Phil used Kodak as an example. Although Kodak owns many of the patents that make digital image capture possible, they didn't capitalise on the advances that they themselves introduced and so lost 90% of their business.
The Taxi business is another classic example with the introduction of Uber, music sales have changed in character completely, as has TV with live streaming. Newsprint is under huge pressure, as is journalism itself. The AFL media unit will soon be a broadcast station in itself.
There are unintended consequences. Amazon began as on line selling service, but now uses its cloud facility to support other retailers, such as Canon, AON etc, SMS developed in the same way.
The Internet of Things connects us to things by WIFI. Examples are door locks, sprinkler systems, refrigeration, light control, security etc. It seems strange, but the average household even now has somewhere around 7 devices attached to WIFI. Weather stations are a popular use of this technology. The particularly clever ones can monitor the weather and rainfall, and adjust your water system accordingly. An estimated 40% saving on water usage.
Phil concluded by drawing our attention to backing up our computer continuously, either to a physical hard drive or to a cloud server.
Change your password often, and make sure it consists numbers symbols and letters. Use different passwords for different application. It won't guarantee that you have absolute security but it will make it harder to hack.
And finally, don't open something that is suspicious! Its if seems to good to be true, on the web it is!!
After fielding several questions that related mostly to NBN, Phil was thanked warmly by PP David Benn.