Daily Tech Digest - November 14, 2020

Data Scientist vs Business Analyst. Here’s the Difference.

Perhaps the biggest similarity of Business Analyst to Data Scientist is the words itself to describe the role. A Data Scientist is expected to perform business analytics in their role as it is essentially what dictates their Data Science goals. A Business Analyst can expect to focus not on Machine Learning algorithms to solve business problems, but instead on surfacing anomalies, shifts and trends, and key points of interest for a business. ... Of course, there are some key differences between these two roles. One of the biggest differences is the use of Machine Learning for Data Scientists only. Another difference is that a Business Analyst can expect to communicate more to stakeholders than a Data Scientist would (sometimes Data Scientist work can be more heads down and not involve as many meetings). Here is a summary of the differences you can expect to find between these positions. ... These two roles share goals with one another. Each requires a deep dive into data with similar tools as well. The process of communication is similar, too — working with stakeholders from the company to go over the business problem, solution, results, and impact. Here is a summary of the key similarities between a Data Scientist and a Business Analyst.


CISA Director Expects to Be Fired Following Secure Election

US officials delivered a statement emphasizing the security of this year's election as news of these firings began to unfold. Members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) say this election "was the most secure in American history." Across the country, they add, officials are reviewing the election process, and states with close calls will recount ballots. "This is an added benefit for security and resilience," they wrote. "This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." Security measures included pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the US Election Assistance Commission's (EAC) certification of voting equipment contribute to confidence in voting systems used in 2020, they said. Officials acknowledged the "many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation" about the election process and emphasize they have the "utmost confidence" in the election's security and integrity.


Security Awareness: Preventing Another Dark Web Horror Story

Our research from last year has already revealed that 1 in 4 people would be willing to pay to get their private information taken down from the dark web – and this number jumps to 50% for those who have experienced a hack. While only 13% have been able to confirm whether a company with which they’ve interacted has been involved in a breach, the reality is it’s much more likely than you’d think – since 2013, over 9.7 billion data records have been lost or stolen, and this number is only rising. Most of us would have no way of knowing whether our information is up for sale online. However, solutions now exist which proactively check for email addresses, usernames and other exposed credentials against third-party databases, alerting users should any leaked information be found. ...  Detection is undoubtedly pivotal in keeping ahead of fraudsters, but the foundations begin with awareness. The majority of breaches take place as a result of simple mistakes which can be easily addressed – using your Facebook password at work or failing to change the default settings of connected devices. But at the same time, businesses must stress the importance of being cyber-aware and foster a culture of security awareness throughout the organisation.


14 Finance Specialists Share Their Largest Fintech Predictions For 2021

There can be extra “bank in a box” tech layers between fintech and banks to allow spinning up partnerships on a sooner timeline. I additionally see extra back-end firms to automate important compliance capabilities akin to Know Your Buyer and regulatory change administration. I additionally assume we are going to see much more “regular” firms providing monetary providers in addition to growing consolidation amongst fintech firms. – Jeanette Fast... An enormous development that might be seen is a renewed want for monetary literacy. Covid-19 compelled everybody to consider each their long- and short-term monetary outlooks. What now we have seen within the auto refinancing sector is that individuals don’t even know you possibly can refinance a car. You’ll discover customers who need to sharpen their funds and firms that can be making an attempt to achieve and educate them. – Tom Holgate, ... The rise of insurance coverage tech will revolutionize the medical insurance trade, with improvements starting from digital well being information to monitoring health. The rise of good contracts offers insurance coverage firms a solution to replace their infrastructure and minimize long-term prices whereas offering shoppers with superior service. – Joseph Safina


How to Keep Up With Big Tech's Hiring Spree

If you’re realizing you need more tech skills to handle the new digital demands of your industry, look first at your existing workforce. Instead of spending time and money on hiring, look for ways to upskill employees interested in a more technical career path and have demonstrated an aptitude for learning. For example, someone in an administrative role who has quickly adapted to remote work might be a good candidate for a scrum master or project management role. If you don’t have the ability to train employees in-house, consider a partnership. ... Hiring, in general, is starting to pick up again. When the pandemic finally subsides and companies begin hiring in full force, most will be looking for talent in the same places. Instead of sourcing recent college grads, look for graduates from coding boot camps and other alternative skilling programs, or target self-taught learners. This crisis has demonstrated that online learning isn’t just possible; it’s a critical part of today’s young people’s development. The talent acquisition team at IBM has made a point to target so-called “new collar” workers to bolster its 360,000-employee workforce. The company has developed a robust learning program for people both inside and outside of the company interested in learning new technical skills.


Digital Robber Barons and Digital Vertical Integration

These Robber Barons leveraged vertical integration to create “economic moats” that locked out and blocked potential competitors. The term “economic moat”, popularized by Warren Buffett, refers to a business' ability to maintain competitive advantages in order to protect its long-term profits and market share from competing firms while charging monopoly-like prices to its customers and onerous terms to its suppliers. Just like a medieval castle, the moat serves to protect the riches of those inside the castle from outsiders. Andrew Carnegie is an example of a Robber Baron who used vertical integration to create economic moats for Carnegie Steel. Carnegie Steel (later U.S. Steel) became the dominant steel supplier in the U.S. through the vertical integration of the steel value chain process. Carnegie owned not only the steel mills that produced the different grades and types of steel, but Carnegie also owned the iron ore mines that was the main ingredient in steel production, coke/coal mines that powered the blast furnaces from which steel was produced, and the railroads and shipping that transported the iron ore and coke to the steel mills and the finished steel products to its customers


Building a secure hybrid cloud

If all your computing assets are stored in a single location which then experiences an extended power outage, phone service or internet outage, natural disaster, or terrorist attack, your business essentially grinds to a halt. Many larger organizations invest in constructing and maintaining multiple data centers for just that reason. For most small businesses, this added cost is beyond their capabilities. Cloud technology removes this challenge by placing the business continuity requirement entirely on the provider. Along the same lines of business continuity, is that because of its ubiquity, cloud provides businesses with a competitive advantage over companies that still rely on legacy on-premises hardware-based solutions. Case in point: I recently worked with a company who had one of their location’s phone lines go down. It took 3 days for 2 different phone companies to figure out whose fault it was and then finally fix the problem. During those 3 days, a busy office was completely down with no phone service whatsoever. This kind of service level might have been acceptable in 1992. However, in the 2020s that’s beyond unacceptable. A cloud communications provider with a guaranteed service-level agreement would have ensured that such a serious outage would never happen.


Testing in Production 101

To start, deploy your first feature to production with the default rule off for safety. This ensures that only the targeted users will have access to the feature. Next, run your automation scripts in production with targeted test users, as well as the regression suite to guarantee previously released features are not affected by your changes. With the feature flag off and only your targeted team members having access to the feature, you will officially be testing in production. This is the time to resolve any bugs and validate all proper functionality. It’s important to remember that because end users do not yet have access to your feature, they will not be impacted if anything does go wrong. After you’ve resolved the issues that appeared in your first test and you’re confident the feature will work properly, it’s time to use a canary release to open up the feature to 1% of your user base. The next days will be spent monitoring error logs and growing your confidence in the feature until you feel it’s appropriate to increase the percentage of users that can access your feature. Once you reach 100% of users and you know without a doubt that the feature works, it’s time to turn on the default rule for the feature.


Digital Twins: Bridging the Physical and Digital World

In short, a digital twin is the precise replica of the physical world preserved through updates on a real-time basis. It is used in virtual reality and 3D data and graphics to create virtual buildings and other models of product, service, system, process, and so on. According to the SAP Senior Vice President of IoT Thomas Kaiser, he says that this is “becoming a business imperative, covering the entire lifecycle of an asset or process and forming the foundation for connected products and services.” ... The concept of a digital twin has been around since 2002 but was shadowed by IoT. However, it has made a resurgence and, in 2017, it was part of Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends. It has made the system cost-effective to implement and become imperative in today’s business, combining virtual and physical worlds to enable analyses of data and monitoring systems. It also helps forestall a problem before it occurs, avoid interruption, advance new opportunities, and plan for the future with simulations. Digital twins enable real-world data for creating simulations for predicting the production process. It incorporates IoT Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and software analytics to augment a better result.


Self-Service Security for Developers Is the DevSecOps Brass Ring

The ability for organizations to fold self-service security functionality into these internal platforms tends to be highly correlated to the degree to which security integration has been achieved across the software delivery life cycle. The survey asked respondents to pick which of the five phases of the life cycle where security is integrated: requirements, design, building, testing, and deployment. It found the ratio of organizations with two or more phases integrated has gone up from 63% last year to 70% this year. The ratio of organizations with complete integration now stands at 12%. As the report explains, the self-service offering of security and compliance validation is intertwined with the push for greater integration. Meanwhile, among those with three to four phases of development integrated with security, 42% offer self-service security and compliance validation. And 58% those that have achieved full security integration across all five phases say they provide self-service security. Companies that have fully integrated security are more than twice as likely to offer self-service security as firms with no security integration.



Quote for the day:

"When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people." -- Guy Kawasaki

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