Remote 2.0: Virtually closing the gap in IT training and sales
Nothing will entirely replace meeting face-to-face, particularly when it comes to IT training and sales. After all, you’re dealing with complex solutions in precise applications. That requires seeing a product in action, demonstrated in real-world scenarios and hands-on test drives.
With the arrival of COVID-19, in-person meetings, events, user groups and training sessions ground to a halt, impacting IT education and sales. While other industries immediately sought to move employees onto basic conferencing platforms like Zoom or WebEx, those in tech had more sophisticated needs, closer to remote 2.0 in comparison. Foremost, training and sales teams have to effectively deliver user and prospect experiences that can transcend today’s physical limitations, turn heads and improve the bottom line. The following are some areas to focus on to elevate your game and bridge the in-person/virtual gap.
A post pandemic world: A technologist's thoughts on professional and social change
It’s sometimes hard to imagine life returning to normal. Nevertheless, this pandemic, like those of the past, will eventually recede, but it won’t leave us unchanged. COVID-19 has already had a dramatic impact on our lives and how we interact, conduct business and obtain the products and services we need.
As chief technology officer of a technology service provider, it’s my job to consider how such events will shape business so we can adjust the services we deliver accordingly. Naturally, I have specific thoughts on topics like backup and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), but I also have to consider societal changes and the ways in which businesses and consumers will utilize technology moving forward. So, what will a world after COVID-19 look like? Here are a few observations and thoughts.
Hiring and employment during COVID-19
The first United States case of COVID-19 was reported on January 20. Since then, the U.S. has become the epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic with more than twice as many confirmed cases as any other country in the world. The disease has led to lockdowns and quarantines on a scale never before seen in the U.S. as well as significant impacts on the economy and job market.
For employees and workplaces, these shifts could reverberate far into the future, potentially transforming virtually every aspect of hiring and employment.
Cybersecurity 2020: The trends SMBs will need to prepare for
The rapid evolution of cybersecurity remained a major issue for small businesses in 2019, being named the top concern for all businesses, regardless of their size. Along with an increase in the number of cybercrimes, the cost of recovering from an attack means keeping ahead of the curve is vital for SMBs going forward.
This is challenging enough for businesses operating on a small budget, but fast-paced changes in technology mean that security resources are increasingly being stretched in a number of directions. Rather than protecting a single, traditional office, security must now cover a whole range of devices used for IoT and mobile working. Proactivity is now essential to an effective security strategy. By looking ahead to the trends of the next 12 months, SMBs can begin to identify the new challenges around cybersecurity that they will need to prepare for.
Legacy VPNs facing unprecedented modern security threats
Remote work is the future. Remote work is our new reality. Even though Gartner predicted that by 2020, half of the US workforce will be working remotely, no one could have anticipated it to become ubiquitous given the COVID-19 outbreak. The once-familiar 9-to-5 office environment as we know it has changed dramatically, and now, nearly everyone has been forced to work from home for the foreseeable future. This change is also expected to become permanent for many companies given the various benefits this model provides.
This rapid global transformation has forced the largest amount of people to work remotely in history. With millions of people connecting to their corporate networks from their homes, network infrastructure is being taxed like never before, creating new issues of internet overload and skyrocketing VPN usage.
Enterprise AI, ground truth, and the 'corona effect'
Nothing in our lifetimes has prepared us for what's happening in our world today. We've certainly had our share of major catastrophes in the past 100 years -- both natural and man made -- but nothing matches the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are living in a time when fundamental assumptions about how our societies function are being thrown out and re-written with blinding speed.
The degree of global disruption is unprecedented in scope and scale, and we're still in the early phases. Given the confluence of medical, social, political, and economic factors, we have not yet reached the peak of the impact, and the world we'll inherit as the storm tide recedes will be significantly changed, and changeable. This is not to suggest that "the end is nigh" or that all changes wrought by the pandemic will be bad. But the undeniable truth is that we are experiencing an unexpected and extreme test of our AI technologies and their ability to automate and improve our ability to make good decisions quickly in increasingly complex situations. With respect to AI, we are entering an especially critical phase.
Microservices, identity, and privacy by design
Part 2: The advent of Microservices has dramatically opened up the ability to rapidly develop and update applications and services. This is done by breaking them into very small pieces, where each piece can be managed by a single team or one team can manage several pieces. Each of these pieces then comes together with hundreds or thousands other pieces to create a larger framework or workflow. They are at the heart of the DevOps methodology, and an expectation today with the idea of a continues development or continuous delivery mindset.
This provides application and service owners the ability to rapidly scale, update, and develop their services is something that most modern business application service owners want. This also makes businesses run more efficiently. An example is when you need more delivery job servers, with Microservices you spawn more job services and you don’t go down. Easier and more efficient. However, in today’s world, we need to remember that privacy and security have to be top concerns. And in today’s world, Microservices are lacking in this area.
How real-time AI can help make decisions throughout the customer journey
When it comes to making quick, real-time business decisions, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proven to be a vital component of any effective business strategy. This is reflected in statistics showing how AI implementation jumped from 48 percent in 2018 to 72 percent in 2019. As technology continues to improve, no doubt this number will continue to increase with AI becoming an even larger asset to improve your operational capacity.
If utilized correctly, real-time AI has the ability to vastly improve real-time decisions for companies throughout the customer journey – from acquisition through to customer service and customer retention.
CIOs in the next ten years: Politics and personality assessments become must-have CIO tools
Over the next decade, the CIO's job will dissolve into the business and take on many of the tasks typically performed by CEOs, CFOs, and even sales departments. This will not be so much of a technology sprawl, as more of a responsibility sprawl that can be attributed to the pervasive spread of digital transformations into every aspect of a company.
No longer will the CIO be only concerned with data backups or IP phone systems -- more and more these will become expected utilities in the same manner as the lights are expected to click on or water is expected to flow in the restroom. This new omnipresent nature of the CIO is absolutely necessary to ensure all business elements run efficiently. In essence, the CIO will become an evangelist for transformations that empower the entire process from supply chains to Salesforce and ERP integrations.
So, what are Microservices?
Part 1: You may have heard the term Microservices before, but every time you do, you ask yourself -- What exactly is a microservice?
Let’s break down exactly what this technology is, why it’s so great for organizations to leverage and challenges they should prepare for.
Wireless charging is at an inflection point
When wireless charging went mainstream a few years back, it was expected to usher in a new era of convenience for consumers. It sounded irresistibly cool -- one of those things you just HAD to try. But when people finally did get their hands on a wireless charger, opened the box, and gave it a shot, the sparks just didn’t fly. This prophesied technology had finally arrived … and it was a letdown.
Before we go any further, let’s get one thing straight: wireless charging itself was not the problem. The concept wasn’t flawed, but the implementation was. We had been promised unparalleled convenience, but what we got was a solution with a fairly large margin of error.
In a world of deepfakes, who can you trust?
Though they seem like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie, deepfakes are very much a reality. In fact, developers have been experimenting with deepfake technology as far back as the late 1990s. Today, deepfakes have become so advanced and believable that they can cause some serious damage in the wrong hands.
"Deepfake" is a term used for the process of replacing someone in an existing image or video with someone else’s likeness. If you’ve watched Former U.S. President Barack Obama giving a lecture about cybercrime or follow the hilarious thread of videos in which various actors have their faces replaced with that of Nicolas Cage, you’ve seen a deepfake. As entertaining as they are, deepfake algorithms are getting more sophisticated every day. When we stop being able to differentiate this synthetic media from reality, a real problem arises.
The surprising state of social media background checks in 2020
Your friends and followers aren't the only ones looking at what you Like. In 2017, CareerBuilder revealed that 70 percent of employers review social media during the hiring process. Today that number may be even higher: one survey by First Advantage found that nearly two-thirds of employers choose to screen all employees and applicants for "red flag" behavior on websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The primary peril of vetting candidates by examining their online profiles remains the same as when this trend first rose to prominence: employers performing "social media background checks" may inadvertently uncover sensitive or protected information which compromises their ability to make an unbiased hiring decision. Not hiring a candidate based on such information, from sexual orientation to religion to race, could expose a business to accusations of unfair or discriminatory hiring practices.
How AI can save companies millions on cloud spend
The cloud has revolutionized making it easy to build, launch, and scale a service. That's driven a wave of spending on the major cloud providers, as made evident by the latest earnings reports from Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), and Google (Google Cloud). Microsoft just reported 62 percent QoQ growth for Azure, AWS brought in nearly $10 billion for Amazon in Q4 2019, and Google reported cloud earnings for the first time in January.
Companies of all sizes are clearly investing billions on the cloud and there doesn't seem to be a ceiling. Gartner predicts that by 2022 overall cloud spend will reach more than $330 billion, and that number grows every year. But at the same time, current estimates reveal that billions of this spend is the result of needless and wasted outlay. A recent survey of companies that spend at least $5 million on the cloud annually found that a vast majority (69 percent) regularly overspend on their cloud budget by 25 percent or more.
Introduction to time series forecasting
From forecasting the weather each day, predicting the future price of an asset, or identifying seasonality in a company’s sales revenue, time series forecasting plays an incredibly important part of our personal and professional lives.
Forecasting the future is never an easy task, although in this article we’ll introduce several statistical and machine learning techniques that can help us with the task. In particular, we’ll cover the following topics:
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