What your smartphone knows about you
Currently, many people unlock their phones by pressing their thumbs onto fingerprint sensor panels or using their fingers to draw patterns on the screens. Those authentication methods are certainly high-tech, but, before long, you’ll likely be unlocking a phone that knows more about you than you’d ever imagine.
Check out some of the smartphone security methods being tested and what they might mean for future users.
How a tech startup masters Disaster Recovery
The technology news has recently seen a few Disaster Recovery (DR) stories that remind us, as both consumers and professionals, of the need to be secure in the knowledge of the service that we provide to you.
The expectations for digital products have never been higher -- we all want intuitive insights and functions that are always on, matched with vast data sources, alongside high performance, across multiple devices.
Microsoft launches English-speaking chatbot in India
Microsoft has released yet another chatbot, and this one is aimed specifically at the Indian market. Named Ruuh, the chatbot is said to enjoy chatting about Bollywood, music, humor, travel and browsing the net.
It is available only in India and only in English, at least for now. It was launched on February 7, with Microsoft filing for a trademark on March 15.
Most UK businesses don't find cloud certifications essential
The cloud skills shortage that’s omnipresent in British business seems to be forcing companies to turn a blind eye on candidates lacking certification. This is according to Microsoft’s newly released report, entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm."
Polling UK businesses for the report, 45 percent said certifications are "nice to have," but just 35 per cent said they’re desirable or essential. The report calls this proportion "surprisingly low," questioning if this could "be a further symptom of the challenges of finding people with adequate skills in the first place".
Cloud skills essential to digital transformation
UK organizations consider cloud skills essential to digital transformation, according to a new report by Microsoft.
Entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm", it says 83 percent of UK’s organizations consider cloud skills "important" or "critical" to digital transformation.
IT workers need clearer career paths
Despite the on-going uncertainty as the UK triggers Brexit proceedings, IT employees remain in high demand as rapid developments in IT are increasingly causing companies to experience wider skills gaps that they are struggling to fill. At 21 percent, IT and digital skills were cited as one of the top three skills most needed by organizations to achieve their business objectives this year.
IT professionals in cloud infrastructure, projects and change management, development and security saw the biggest salary increases last year of over two percent, however almost half of IT employees were dissatisfied with their rate of pay this year.
UK companies doing little to address cloud skills gender gap
When it comes to cloud skills, there’s a significant gender gap, and it’s particularly visible in the UK. This is according to a new report by Microsoft, entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm." According to it, the gender mix among technical IT staff is 20 percent female versus 80 percent male. In just a fifth of companies (21 percent) the gender mix was 40 percent or greater.
Microsoft says this gender imbalance is "concerning," but perhaps even more concerning is the fact that very few companies are actually doing something about it. A third (35 percent) said they had no policies to address the issues (46 percent for companies with 250 to 999 staff). A quarter (23 percent) said they didn’t know of any actions put in place.
Is your BI AI ready?
Digital transformation is happening at a rapid rate, and in order to stay competitive, organizations need to push the limits of their traditional BI and analytics frameworks with predictive and prescriptive capabilities to generate faster and more accurate business outcomes. Gartner predicts that by 2020, predictive and prescriptive analytics will attract 40 percent of enterprises' net new investment in business intelligence and analytics.
Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools and analytics frameworks are still in the descriptive stage and can only assist users with the two questions -- "what is happening?" or "what has happened?" To answer the "what will happen next?", predictive, prescriptive, and cognitive computing is necessary. These 3 types of analytics are being enhanced by AI technology to automate mundane and repetitive tasks and predict a clear path going forward. Data is being analyzed faster and more accurately with these advanced analytics frameworks, and decisions are being automated with machine learning to decrease human error and increase the organization’s bottom line profit. Machine learning can detect new patterns and opportunities that humans cannot.
Four best practices for leveraging Office 365 Groups
It’s no secret that cloud-based collaboration tools are transforming the way we work, and Microsoft, with Office 365, is playing a major role in shifting workplace communication. Last year, Microsoft continued to enhance and develop Office 365 Groups as a powerful hub for team productivity. When armed with Office 365 Groups, employees have the opportunity to collaborate within a dedicated space with popular Office 365 features like mail, persistent chat, and collaboration powered by familiar technologies like Exchange, SharePoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, and Planner.
Before organizations can embrace this new way of working, however, IT teams need to combat the challenges of natively managing Office 365 Groups. Why? First, there are several ways for users in an organization to create a Group within an Office 365 tenant -- meaning IT admins must determine the most effective way to implement administrative controls to prevent unnecessary sprawl. Once users have the ability to create new Office 365 Groups, IT is also tasked with controlling group membership, placing safeguards around content within groups, and overseeing the lifecycle of Groups, including the eventual decision to delete or archive a Group and its content.
Amazon unveils Connect contact center solution
Amazon has announced a new contact center solution aimed to "power millions of customer conversations." The solution, named Amazon Connect, is a cloud-based offering, with customers paying by the minute of usage.
It all starts with the "Virtual Contact Center" solution, integrated deep within AWS. According to Amazon, it only takes a couple of minutes to set the feature up and it requires no special training to use. Payment by the minute goes on top of telephony costs, a pricing model AWS uses in its cloud services, too.
Businesses lose 44 data records every second
Before you are done reading this article, there will have been more than 2,500 digital records stolen. This is according to a new report by Gemalto, which was released to show just how unprepared UK's businesses are for cyber risks.
Gemalto says that in 2016 1.37 billion data records were compromised. That basically means 3,776,738 records every day, 157,364 every hour, 2,623 every minute, or 44 data records every second.
AI and Humans: Focusing on what we can achieve together
Dystopian fever spiked again last week as PwC issued a report predicting UK jobs carnage at the hands of robots over the coming decade. "Artificial Intelligence" has dark overtones in the media and the popular imagination. Some of us are buzzed about this new era of augmented human performance and meaningful human computer interactions. Others worry for their livelihoods, even their personal freedoms.
AI technology has improved significantly over the last few years, mainly because of a combination of a huge increase in the availability of data and cheap computation. This means that AI researchers now have meaningful amounts of "training data" to train their models and the computational power needed to run complex learning approaches. The sudden acceleration of AI performance is a thrilling development for data scientists, and great seed material for ominous sci-fi and gloomy consultancy forecasts.
How to sell DevOps in your company
In today’s complex business environment, the increasing rate of change has resulted in increased expectations for more value in less time. Today’s organizations are expected to delight customers, stay ahead of competitors, and react and adapt instantly when needed. To meet these demands, software must be capable of evolving and adapting continuously. As a result, regardless of industry, the thing on which companies now compete has become hyper-automation of the software development process.
Enter DevOps. Business leaders from fledgling startups to enterprise heavyweights, are coming to the realization that they need to embrace concepts like DevOps. As DevOps specialist and author Gene Kim states: "DevOps solves the most important business problem of our generation, [which is] how organizations make the transition from good to great."
The real cost of downtime
One of the best things about today? Stuff just works.
Consider the hours you once spent tapping your pen to the tune of broadband dial-up. And what about blowing on your Sega cartridge to get the game to load? These are a thing of the past.
Internet outages cost the UK economy £7 billion in 2016
Organizations in the UK have had a total of three days of Internet outages in 2016 each, according to a new report by Beaming. The UK economy lost £7 billion because of it, while companies lost productivity and had to cover for extra overtime.
More than 75 percent of companies polled for the report say they experienced at least one connectivity failure that stopped them from accessing crucial services. In 2016, on average, a company suffered four outages, waiting six hours for each one to be fixed.
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