Today's Tech Digest - Dec 19, 2018

This is what a no-deal Brexit means for tech companies and jobs

For tech companies, the worst-case no-deal Brexit could see data flows between the UK and Europe cut or significantly curtailed, major difficulties with recruiting staff from Europe and sending staff to Europe to work on projects, problems with importing products and spare parts, plus a generally worsening economic situation. In fact, the impact of a potential no-deal Brexit is already being felt. Larger tech companies are spending a lot of time figuring out their response to Brexit and are putting in place or triggering various contingency measures. Meanwhile, smaller businesses don't necessarily know where to start or what the implications of a no-deal might be, and don't have the time, money or resources to deal with it anyway. Many firms will simply find it impossible to plan for a no-deal Brexit, says Nigel Driffield, professor of strategy and international business at Warwick Business School.

Open-source containers move toward high-performance computing

Until quite recently, the high-performance market with its emphasis on big data and supercomputing, paid little attention to containers. This was largely because the tightly coupled technology model of supercomputing didn't fit well into the loosely coupled microservices world that containers generally serve. There were security concerns, as well, since. For example, Docker applications often bestow root privileges on those running them — an issue that doesn't work very well in the supercomputing world where security is exceedingly important. A significant change came about when Singularity — a container system with a focus on high-performance computing — became available. Now provided by Sylabs, Singularity began as an open-source project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2015. Singularity was born because there was a lot of interest in containers for compute, but the commonly used containers (Docker) at the time did not support compute-focused, HPC-type use cases.

Privacy no more: How machine learning in the cloud will strip us naked

Machine learning is an essential part of the digital transformation trend in the modern enterprise. The ability to gain insight into business processes through what is measurable using different types of sensors, and to correlate that data using pattern analysis, is an increasingly important capability that is quickly becoming an essential part of the overall IT toolbox. For example, companies like SAP, through Leonardo Intelligent Enterprise products, have brought together IoT along with finished application platforms deployed as cloud-based SaaS, which can be easily customized so that enterprises can create complex data visualizations in order to gain insight when solving complex business problems. Understanding patterns and trends through big data is nothing new: The National Security Agency has been doing complex signal intelligence (SIGINT) for many years in order to defend the country from terrorist and foreign threats.

What is SWOT analysis? A strategic tool for achieving objectives

SWOT analyses from major corporations can help you get an idea of how the process works. Strategic Management Insight offers examples of SWOT analysesfor a wide range of companies, including Google, Starbucks and Amazon. Its example SWOT analysis of Microsoft evaluates the potential impact of a major leadership change in the organization — in this case, the hiring of CEO Satya Nadella. SM Insight identifies Microsoft’s strengths as the company’s brand awareness, it’s wide acceptance in the enterprise, easy-to-use products, a worldwide network of distributors and an ability to beat analyst’s expectations. Weaknesses include being late to mobile computing, a lack of urgency when the internet was introduced and security flaws in its software. Cloud computing was seen as a big opportunity for Microsoft at that time, as the organization had the chance to take the lead in this trend, and the company was economically strong. Microsoft’s biggest threats included the company’s size, which can slow progress, as well as a failure to notice emerging trends, piracy and lawsuits.

ThoughtWorks COO reveals his top tech predictions for 2019

Companies will continue to leverage technology to gain efficiencies and cost savings. But replacing jobs with machines leads to a zero-sum game and will only take you so far, given its deleterious impact on society and the economy. At ThoughtWorks, we believe that humans and machines can collaborate and this intelligent co-working is what we call Humanity Augmented. Humanity Augmented makes available intelligent tools to augment human capability; aiding in better and quicker decision making, reducing and eliminating mundane and repetitive tasks and allowing people to spend time unleashing their creativity on more complex and fulfilling work. By bringing together human experience and intuition and the ability of machines to process humongous volumes of data, we will be able to address the short-term job losses and in the long-term tackle long- standing issues that the human race faces.

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