March 11, 2022

The secrets of successful cloud-first strategies

“Cloud-native is much more than just technology,” Rubina says. Companies need to take a fundamental shift in mindset away from traditional waterfall development toward more agile development principles such as the DevOps model, and automation. “Cloud-native must be a strategic approach; it must be driven by top management as it is a response to a wide range of business needs,” Rubina says. “And these need to be well defined and rolled out by senior management. It is about changes in the business model, about entering new markets, about the ability to adapt quickly to create innovative products and services and drastically reduce time to market.” ... “Determine if you’ll be using a fixed-cost structure flexible for the cloud,” Hon says. “Are you leveraging showback or chargeback to the business? And keep in mind seasonality. You want to have an idea of how often you scale up and shrink down and what that looks like. Building out cost models is key for how you can build a budget.” With a traditional data center, companies buy and install hardware with workload peaks in mind, Hon says.?

Moving a Legacy Data Warehouse to the Cloud? SAP’s Answer

As currently designed, SAP BW Bridge is primarily intended as a data acquisition and staging layer — which has been the mainstay for BW. Other capabilities, such as planning, are outside the scope of BW Bridge; instead, SAP directs BW customers to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) Planning, which for now is a separate offering; later this year, SAP will add support SAC planning on top of DWC based data models. The scenarios for SAP BW Bridge are, not surprisingly, centered around bringing SAP legacy data sources into the modern cloud data warehousing world. It could include those that want to replicate their existing BW environment and operational reports but in a managed cloud environment. And of course, it could involve migrating more modern BW/4HANA on-premises as well. And, as noted above, with cross-space sharing, BW data could be shared with other greenfield analytics, and mixed with data from other sources, developed in DWC. SAP BW Bridge is an acknowledgment that, for classic or legacy systems to make it into the cloud, cloud SaaS providers have to provide more flexibility to accommodate the types of customizations that permeate legacy systems.

Database technology evolves to combine machine learning and data storage

The new model offers not just the potential for tapping the power of AI algorithms, but also a more flexible search engine that isn’t locked into searching for exact matches. While traditional databases require the names to be spelled correctly or the exact confirmation code to locate a record, Weaviate can find entries that are the most similar. What does it mean to be similar? That’s still a wide open question for many users. Much of the art goes into defining how to calculate just how close or far apart two pieces of data might be. Finding the closest records in the database begins with finding a metric or a way to specify just what it means to be nearby in some multidimensional space defined by an AI. While SeMI Technologies is the main fundraiser, much of the branding is focused on Weaviate, the open source database. Companies can download the code or purchase Weaviate as a managed service. Many Weaviate users rely on pre-built models for text in English and other well-known languages. There’s one model built out of the entire collection of Wikipedia articles that SeMI built, so people could experiment.?

Using the Problem Reframing Method to Build Innovative Solutions

First, reframing is not analysis. It is not about finding the root cause analysis and asking “Why is this problem existing?” Reframing starts before that, when you ask “What problem are we trying to solve?” and “Is this the right problem to solve?” Reframing is about looking at the big picture and thinking of the problem from different angles. Second, reframing is not about finding the real problem but finding a better problem to solve. The advantages of reframing a problem are generating more options, opening the problem space (diverge) and in the end, building better solutions by solving a better problem. Let’s look into a simple example that Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg explained in his book “What’s your problem?” Imagine you are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It’s too slow, and they have to wait a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don’t fix the problem. When asked, most people directly jump into thinking of solutions: install a new lift, upgrade the motor, or perhaps improve the algorithm that runs the lift.?

Code Verify: An open source browser extension for verifying code authenticity on the web

Code Verify expands on the concept of subresource integrity, a security feature that lets web browsers verify that the resources they fetch haven’t been manipulated. Subresource integrity applies only to single files, but Code Verify checks the resources on the entire webpage. To do this at scale, and to enhance trust in the process, Code Verify partners with Cloudflare to act as a trusted third party. We’ve given Cloudflare a cryptographic hash source of truth for WhatsApp Web’s JavaScript code. When someone uses Code Verify, the extension automatically compares the code that runs on WhatsApp Web against the version of the code verified by WhatsApp and published on Cloudflare. If there are any inconsistencies, Code Verify will notify the user. While comparing hashes to detect files that have been tampered with is not new, Code Verify does so automatically, with the help of Cloudflare’s third-party verification, and at this scale for the first time. WhatsApp’s security protections, the Code Verify extension, and Cloudflare all work together to provide real-time code verification.?

Chainlink for Enterprises: The Gateway to All Blockchains

Chainlink is secure, open-source blockchain middleware (referred to as an “oracle”) that provides smart contracts with any type of data or computation that they cannot inherently obtain on their native blockchain due to technical, financial, governance, or legal constraints. Unlike blockchains, which maintain internal consistency around transaction validation, Chainlink aims to generate and deliver oracle reports to blockchains that accurately reflect the state of external events and computation. Chainlink oracles are able to generate oracle reports because the Chainlink oracle node software can read data from and write data to blockchains and APIs and perform off-chain computation. Chainlink generates trust-minimization for oracle reports through mechanisms similar to those used by blockchains, such as decentralized validation, cryptographic signatures, and financial/reputational incentives outlined in service level agreements (SLAs).

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