October 19, 2020

How To Build Out a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

While a multi-cloud approach can deliver serious value in terms of resiliency, flexibility and cost savings, making sure you’re choosing the right providers requires a comprehensive assessment. Luckily, all main cloud vendors offer free trial services so you can establish which ones best fit your needs and see how they work with each other. It will pay to conduct proofs-of-concept using the free trials and run your data and code on each provider. You also need to make sure that you’re able to move your data and code around easily during the trials. It’s also important to remember that each cloud provider has different strengths—one company’s best option is not necessarily the best choice for you. For example, if your startup is heavily reliant on running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, you might opt for Google Cloud’s AI open source platform. Or perhaps you require an international network of data centers, minimal latency and data privacy compliance for certain geographies for your globally used app. Here’s where AWS could step in. On the other hand, you might need your cloud applications to seamlessly integrate with the various Microsoft tools that you already use. This would make the case for Microsoft Azure.

How data and technology can strengthen company culture

Remote working exposed another potential weakness holding back teams from realising their potential – employee expertise that isn’t being shared. Under the lockdown, many companies realised that knowledge and experience within their workforce were highly concentrated within specific offices, regions, teams, or employees. How can these valuable insights be shared seamlessly across internal networks? A truly collaborative company culture must go beyond limited solutions, such as excessive video calls, which run the risk of burning people out. Collaboration tools that support culture have to be chosen based on their effectiveness at improving interactions, bridging gaps and simplifying knowledge sharing. ... While revamping strategies in recent months, many companies have started to prioritise customer retention and expansion over new customer acquisition, given the state of the economy. Data and technology can help employees adapt to this transition. Investing in tools that empower employees gives them the confidence, knowledge and skills they need to deliver maximum customer value. This in turn boosts customer satisfaction as staff deliver an engaging and consistent experience each time they connect.

Cloud environment complexity has surpassed human ability to manage

“The benefits of IT and business automation extend far beyond cost savings. Organizations need this capability – to drive revenue, stay connected with customers, and keep employees productive – or they face extinction,” said Bernd Greifeneder, CTO at Dynatrace. “Increased automation enables digital teams to take full advantage of the ever-growing volume and variety of observability data from their increasingly complex, multicloud, containerized environments. With the right observability platform, teams can turn this data into actionable answers, driving a cultural change across the organization and freeing up their scarce engineering resources to focus on what matters most – customers and the business.” ... 93% of CIOs said AI-assistance will be critical to IT’s ability to cope with increasing workloads and deliver maximum value to the business. CIOs expect automation in cloud and IT operations will reduce the amount of time spent ‘keeping the lights on’ by 38%, saving organizations $2 million per year, on average. Despite this advantage, just 19% of all repeatable operations processes for digital experience management and observability have been automated. “History has shown successful organizations use disruptive moments to their advantage,” added Greifeneder.

A New Risk Vector: The Enterprise of Things

The ultimate goal should be the implementation of a process for formal review of cybersecurity risk and readout to the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and audit committee. Each of these steps must be undertaken on an ongoing basis, instead of being viewed as a point-in-time exercise. Today's cybersecurity landscape, with new technologies and evolving adversary trade craft, demands a continuous review of risk by boards, as well as the constant re-evaluation of the security budget allocation against rising risk areas. to ensure that every dollar spent on cybersecurity directly buys down those areas of greatest risk. We are beginning to see some positive trends in this direction. Nearly every large public company board of directors today has made cyber-risk an element either of the audit committee, risk committee, or safety and security committee. The CISO is also getting visibility at the board level, in many cases presenting at least once if not multiple times a year. Meanwhile, shareholders are beginning to ask the tough questions during annual meetings about what cybersecurity measures are being implemented. In today's landscape, each of these conversations about cyber-risk at the board level must include a discussion about the Enterprise of Things given the materiality of risk.

FreedomFI: Do-it-yourself open-source 5G networking

FreedomFi offers a couple of options to get started with open-source private cellular through their website. All proceeds will be reinvested towards building up the Magma's project open-source software code. Sponsors contributing $300 towards the project will receive a beta FreedomFi gateway and limited, free access to the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) shared spectrum in the 3.5 GHz "innovation band." Despite the name "good-buddy," CBRS has nothing to do with the CB radio service used by amateurs and truckers for two-way voice communications. CB lives on in the United States in the 27MHz band. Those contributing at $1,000 dollars will get support with a "network up" guarantee, offering FreedomFi guidance over a series of Zoom sessions. The company guarantees they won't give up until you get a connection. FreedomFi will be demonstrating an end-to-end private cellular network deployment during their upcoming keynote at the Open Infrastructure Summit and publishing step-by-step instructions on the company blog. This isn't just a hopeful idea being launched on a wing and a prayer. WiConnect Wireless is already working with it. "We operate hundreds of towers, providing fixed wireless access in rural areas of Wisconsin," said Dave Bagett, WiConnect's president.

Why We Must Unshackle AI From the Boundaries of Human Knowledge

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made astonishing progress in the last decade. AI can now drive cars, diagnose diseases from medical images, recommend movies, even whom you should date, make investment decisions, and create art that people have sold at auction. A lot of research today, however, focuses on teaching AI to do things the way we do them. For example, computer vision and natural language processing – two of the hottest research areas in the field – deal with building AI models that can see like humans and use language like humans. But instead of teaching computers to imitate human thought, the time has now come to let them evolve on their own, so instead of becoming like us, they have a chance to become better than us. Supervised learning has thus far been the most common approach to machine learning, where algorithms learn from datasets containing pairs of samples and labels. For example, consider a dataset of enquiries (not conversions) for an insurance website with information about a person’s age, occupation, city, income, etc. plus a label indicating whether the person eventually purchased the insurance.

Read more here ...