IT leaders adjusting to expanded role and importance since coronavirus pandemic
"IT had to ensure that their technical environment could handle the increased
online demand, as well any downstream impacts to supply chain, logistics and
payment applications all connected to the online engine keeping the company
operating and in business. IT had to refocus efforts to enable more robust
customer engagements remotely via applications and web portals." She said the
best examples of this are insurance claims, government services and
applications, most of which were not submitted or enabled via an application
or web portal before the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the increase in importance
due to the pandemic, IT has been gaining prominence within enterprises for
years, Doebel said. IT has long been moving towards the role of
business-critical for several years now as technology and innovation have
become synonymous with business growth and improved customer
experiences. IT teams rose to the occasion during the COVID-19 breakout
and continue to drive innovation and transformation in these challenging
times, she added. Important business decisions are now being put in the hands
of IT workers who have to think of ways to future-proof their organizations.
5 famous analytics and AI disasters
In October 2020, Public Health England (PHE), the UK government body
responsible for tallying new COVID-19 infections, revealed that nearly 16,000
coronavirus cases went unreported between Sept 25 and Oct 2. The culprit? Data
limitations in Microsoft Excel. PHE uses an automated process to transfer
COVID-19 positive lab results as a CSV file into Excel templates used by
reporting dashboards and for contact tracing. Unfortunately, Excel
spreadsheets can have a maximum of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per
worksheet. Moreover, PHE was listing cases in columns rather than rows. ...
The "glitch" didn't prevent individuals who got tested from receiving their
results, but it did stymie contact tracing efforts, making it harder for the
UK National Health Service (NHS) to identify and notify individuals who were
in close contact with infected patients. In a statement on Oct. 4, Michael
Brodie, interim chief executive of PHE, said NHS Test and Trace and PHE
resolved the issue quickly and transferred all outstanding cases immediately
into the NHS Test and Trace contact tracing system. PHE put in place a "rapid
mitigation" that splits large files and has conducted a full end-to-end review
of all systems to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Legal and security risks for businesses unaware of open source implications
The sobering reality is that compliance is not keeping up with usage of open
source codebases. In view of this, businesses have to consider the impact of
open source software in their operations as they move forward in a digitally
connected world. Whether they are developing a product using open source
components or involved in mergers and acquisitions activity, they have to
conduct due diligence on the security and legal risks involved. One approach
that has been proposed is to have a Bill of Materials (BOM) for software. Just
like BOM used commonly by manufacturers of hardware, such as smartphones, a
BOM for software will list the components and dependencies for each
application and offer more visibility. In particular, a BOM generated by an
independent software composition analysis (SCA) will offer advanced
understanding for businesses seeking to understand the foundation on which
they are building so many of their applications. Awareness is key to
improvement. For starters, businesses cannot patch what they don't know they
have. Patches must match source, so they know their code's origin. Open source
is not only about source, either.
Building a hybrid SQL Server infrastructure
The solution to this challenge is to build a SANless failover cluster using
SIOS DataKeeper. SIOS DataKeeper performs block-level replication of all the
data on your on-prem storage to the local storage attached to your cloud-based
VM. If disaster strikes your on-prem infrastructure and the WSFC fails SQL
Server over to the cloud-based cluster node, that cloud-based node can access
its own copy of your SQL Server databases and can fill in for your on-prem
infrastructure for as long as you need it to. One other advantage afforded by
the SANless failover cluster approach is that there is no limit on the number
of databases you can replicate. Where you would need to upgrade to SQL Server
Enterprise Edition to replicate your user databases to a third node in the
cloud, the SANless clustering approach works with both the SQL Server Standard
and Enterprise editions. While SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to two
nodes in the cluster, DataKeeper allows you to replicate to a third node in
the cloud with a manual recovery process. With Enterprise Edition the third
node in the cloud can simply be part of the same cluster.
Why Enterprises Struggle with Cloud Data Lakes
The success of any cloud data lake project hinges on continual changes to
maximize performance, reliability and cost efficiency. Each of these variables
require constant and detailed monitoring and management of end-to-end
workloads. Consider the evolution of data processing engines and the
importance of leveraging the most advantageous opportunities around price and
performance. Managing workload price performance and cloud cost optimization
is just as crucial to cloud data lake implementations, where costs can and
will quickly get out of hand if proper monitoring and management aren’t in
place. ... Public cloud resources aren’t private by default. Securing a
production cloud data lake requires extensive configuration and customization
efforts–especially for enterprises that must fall in line with specific
regulatory compliance oversights and governance mandates (HIPAA, PCI DSS,
GDPR, etc). Achieving the requisite data safeguards often means enlisting
experienced and dedicated teams who are equipped to lock down cloud resources
and restrict access to only users that are authorized and credentialed.
The No-Code Generation is arriving
Of course, no-code tools often require code, or at least, the sort of
deductive logic that is intrinsic to coding. You have to know how to design a
pivot table, or understand what machine learning capability is and what it
might be useful for. You have to think in terms of data, and about inputs,
transformations and outputs. The key here is that no-code tools aren’t
successful just because they are easier to use — they are successful because
they are connecting with a new generation that understands precisely the sort
of logic required by these platforms to function. Today’s students don’t just
see their computers and mobile devices as consumption screens and have the
ability to turn them on. They are widely using them as tools of
self-expression, research and analysis. Take the popularity of platforms like
Roblox and Minecraft. Easily derided as just a generation’s obsession with
gaming, both platforms teach kids how to build entire worlds using their
devices. Even better, as kids push the frontiers of the toolsets offered by
these games, they are inspired to build their own tools. There has been a
proliferation of guides and online communities to teach kids how to build
their own games and plugins for these platforms (Lua has never been so
popular).
Digital transformation: 4 contrarian tips for measuring success
A CIO once told me that his employees felt confused about how their
transformation progress was going. I asked, “How many transformations are you
doing right now?” He started listing and realized that his team had 15
simultaneous ongoing changes. Worse, every change included different
touchpoints for every individual end user, which created even more confusion
for those who didn’t understand why the change was happening. Every
incremental digitalization initiative should have a person or team responsible
for it – the CIO, CTO, or CEO, or perhaps the internal services organization
if it’s driving internal efficiency. In the cases of disruptive innovation, it
should take place where it's easy to let go of the past ways of doing things,
typically in a separate innovation unit. Measure the outcomes you’re looking
to achieve and communicate from an outcome perspective, often through a story
– and if your transformation does not fit into your objectives and key results
or KPIs ... However, too much of either can hurt your progress and indicate a
wider problem in your organization: Either you sweep negative feedback under
the rug and focus only on the positive, which creates a culture of fear, or
you focus only on the negative and forget to celebrate the good stuff, which
can destroy motivation and cause a complaint culture.
Role Of E-Commerce In Driving Technology Adoption For Indian Warehousing Sector
Global supply chains and logistics sectors have undergone a major disruption
during the past few months, thanks to the pandemic. Several first-time users
logged on to e-commerce websites to make safe, virtual purchases for
essentials and had a contactless delivery experience at their doorstep. The
sector also witnessed a major shift in popular categories, from luxury and
lifestyle purchases to shopping for basic essentials such as groceries,
medicines, office and school supplies, e-learning tools and even food
delivery. As per an impact report released by Uni-commerce, titled E-commerce
Trends Report 2020, e-commerce has witnessed an order-volume growth of 17 per
cent as of June 2020, and about 65 per cent growth in single brand e-commerce
platforms. However, in-spite of challenges such as manufacturing slowdown,
shortage of labour, transportation bottlenecks, and disruption in national and
international movement of cargo, the massive rise of e-commerce has brought
about faster digital adoption and enhanced the potential for overall growth of
the sector. With a focus on meeting consumer expectations for speedy delivery,
customization, product availability and easy returns while handling complex
globalization of supply chains, warehousing trends have witnessed major
shifts.
A robot referee can really keep its ‘eye’ on the ball
Human umps may feel hot or tired. They may have the sun in their eyes or
become distracted by a mosquito. They may even unintentionally favor players
of certain nationalities, races, ages or backgrounds. A machine will not
experience any of these problems. So how does the machine do it? Engineers
must first spend several days setting up each stadium that will use the
system. They measure the precise position of all the lines and “create a
virtual-reality world to mirror what is in the stadium,” explains Hicks. They
also set up 12 cameras. These will watch every part of the area where the game
takes place. Then the engineers run tests — lots of them — to make sure
everything works as it should. During a match, those cameras capture a ball’s
flight. Software finds the tennis ball in the video. It can do this in bright,
overcast or shadowy conditions. A video camera doesn’t capture every single
moment of the ball’s flight, however. It actually takes many still photos very
quickly. The number of photos it can take in one second is called the frame
rate. In each frame, the ball will be in a new position. The system uses math
to calculate a smooth path between all these positions. It also takes wind
conditions into account.
That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate
So what does Twingate ultimately do? For corporate IT professionals, it allows
them to connect an employee’s device into the corporate network much more
flexibly than VPN. For instance, individual services or applications on a
device could be setup to securely connect with different servers or data
centers. So your Slack application can connect directly to Slack, your JIRA
site can connect directly to JIRA’s servers, all without the typical
round-trip to a central hub that VPN requires. That flexibility offers two
main benefits. First, internet performance should be faster, since traffic is
going directly where it needs to rather than bouncing through several relays
between an end-user device and the server. Twingate also says that it offers
“congestion” technology that can adapt its routing to changing internet
conditions to actively increase performance. More importantly, Twingate allows
corporate IT staff to carefully calibrate security policies at the network
layer to ensure that individual network requests make sense in context. For
instance, if you are salesperson in the field and suddenly start trying to
access your company’s code server, Twingate can identify that request as
highly unusual and outright block it.
Quote for the day:
"In simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up, and goes." -- John Erksine
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