Gartner says composable data and analytics key to digital transformation
Gartner said business-facing data initiatives were key drivers of digital
transformation in the enterprise. Research showed that 72% of data and analytics
leaders are leading, or are heavily involved, in their organizations’ digital
transformation efforts. These data leaders now confront emerging trends on
various fronts. XOps: The evolution of DataOps to support AI and machine
learning workflows is now XOps. The X could also stand for MLOps, ModelOps, and
even FinOps. This promises to bring flexibility and agility in coordinating the
infrastructure, data sources, and business needs in new ways. Engineering
decision intelligence: Decision support is not new, but now decision-making is
more complex. Engineering decision intelligence frames a wide range of
techniques, from conventional analytics to AI to align and tune decision models
and make them more repeatable, understandable, and traceable. Data and analytics
as the core business function: With the chaos of the pandemic and other
disruptors, data and analytics are becoming more central to an organization’s
success. Companies will have to prioritize data and analytics as core functions
rather than as secondary activity handled by IT.
Everything you need to know to land a job in data science
What does it take to get hired? Organizations are looking for job candidates
with a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, as well as experience
with data modeling tools, XML, Python, Java, SQL, AWS and Hadoop. Many data
scientist job descriptions also mention the ability to work with a distributed
and fast-moving team. Interpreting data for colleagues in business units is
increasingly important as well. Ryan Boyd, head of developer relations at
Databricks, said that data science will soon be a commonplace skill outside
engineering and IT departments as data becomes increasingly fundamental to
businesses. "To stay competitive, data scientists need to be equally as obsessed
with data storytelling as they are with the minutiae of data software and
programs," said Boyd. "Tomorrow's best data scientists will be expected to
translate their know-how into actionable insights and compelling stories for
different stakeholders across the business, from C-suite executives to product
managers." Whether you are looking for your first data science job or figuring
out your next career move in the field, the following advice from hiring
managers and data science professionals will help you plot a smart and
successful course.
Observability and GitOps
The old supervision methods have reached their limits in the supervision of the
new standards of application architecture. The management of highly scalable and
portable microservices requires the adaptation of tools in order to facilitate
debugging and diagnosis at all times, thus, requiring the observability of
systems. Often, monitoring and observability are confused. Basically, the idea
of a monitoring system is to get a state of the system based on a predefined set
of metrics to detect a known set of issues. According to the SRE book by Google,
a monitoring system needs to answer two simple questions: “What’s broken, and
why?” Analyzing an application over the long term makes it possible to profile
it in order to better understand its behavior regarding external events and,
thus, be proactive in its management. Observability, on the other hand, aims to
measure the understanding of a system state based on multiple outputs. This
means observability is a system capability, like reliability, scalability, or
security, that must be designed and implemented during system design, coding,
and testing.
Defending Against Web Scraping Attacks
Web scraping can easily lead to more significant attacks. At my company, we
routinely use Web scraping as one of the initial steps in a red team or
phishing engagement. By pulling the metadata from posted documents, we can
find employee names, usernames, and deduce username and email formats, which
is particularly helpful when the username format would otherwise be difficult
to guess. Mix this with scraping a list of current employees from sites like
LinkedIn, and an adversary can perform targeted phishing and credential
brute-force attacks. ... Scraping document metadata is also useful for
detecting internal hostnames and software versions in use at the targeted
company. This enables an attacker to customize the attack to exploit
vulnerabilities specific to that company, and it is an important part of
victim reconnaissance. Adversaries can also use scraping to collect gated
information from a website if that information isn't properly protected. Take
Facebook's password-reset page: Anyone can find privately listed people
through a simple query with a phone number. While a password-reset page may be
necessary, does it really need to confirm or, worse, return a user's private
information?
From DevOps to MLOPS: Integrate Machine Learning Models using Jenkins and Docker
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), known as CI/CD
pipeline, embody a culture with agile operating principles and practices for
DevOps teams that allows software development teams to change code more
frequently and reliably or data scientist to continuously test the models for
accuracy. CI/CD is a way to focus on business requirements such as improved
models accuracy, automated deployment steps or code quality. Continuous
integration is a set of practices that drive development teams to continuously
implement small changes and check in code to version control repositories.
Today, data scientists and IT ops have at their disposal different platforms
(on premises, private and public cloud, multi-cloud …) and tools that need to
be addressed by an automatic integration and validation mechanism allowing
building, package and test applications with agility. Continuous delivery
steps in when continuous integration ends by automating the delivery of
applications to selected platforms.
Data Discovery for Business Intelligence
Any company that has had a BI tool for more than a year will deal with the
dashboard clutter problem. Ad-hoc analysis, quarterly reports, and even core
dashboards get outdated or change to a new version over time. The problem is,
old dashboards usually don’t get deleted. No one wants to delete a dashboard
in the shared folder because someone might be using it. This creates a long
tail of clutter and inactive reports that people may poke around in, but they
won’t be sure if the data is reliable or relevant. Navigating BI tools becomes
its own tribal knowledge task and, it ends up being best to ask others to send
you a specific link to open. What could be worse is that there may be someone
relying on an outdated dashboard for their day-to-day operations. This often
happens because dashboard metadata and its freshness isn’t tracked
automatically. Connecting dashboard metadata along with its operational
metrics like the last successful report run, last edited time, and top users
can give visibility into the health of the dashboard. By comparing usage data
along with operational metrics, outdated data models can easily be identified
and cleaned out.
Big data is the key to everything. Here are four ways to improve how you use it
While most companies want to focus on the exciting bits, it's the
infrastructure that matters. "I think it's almost like a bamboo tree; unless
your roots are strong, your tree won't shoot up 90 feet. So for me, the focus
on roots is super important," he says. When the foundation is right, you can
then start to explore some of the interesting elements of data. During the
past 12 months, for example, KFC has strengthened its own digital channels in
response to the coronavirus pandemic. Traffic to the web app increased
significantly through 2020 as click-and-collect and curb-side pick-up became
more popular. ... "When the grape is cut from the vineyard, you don't
have much time to make the fermentation process because the grape is degrading
in the truck. So we have to move fast," he says. With brands such as Casillero
del Diablo and Don Melchor, Concha y Toro operates in over 140 countries,
making it one of the biggest wine companies in the world. Data is especially
important at harvest time, when the company brings trucks with grapes from
different parts of Chile to its wineries.
Four Technologies Disrupting Banking
Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, has the potential to radically
change who has control over our personally identifiable information (PII)
and make financial institutions — and online transactions — much more
trustworthy. Blockchain can help prove a person’s identity, allowing
consumers to create a verified, digital identity they can use with any
online institution. By leveraging public key cryptography and referencing a
person’s verified credentials on a trustworthy, shared log (the distributed
ledger), blockchain can help give people control over their digital identity
credentials. Consumers could keep their identity credentials safe and use
them as cryptographic evidence whenever their bank or another online
business needs to verify their identity. They could also revoke access at
any time. A blockchain infrastructure across the internet would give
consumers a portable identity to use in digital channels and true control
over their PII disclosure. This can help stop fraudulent payment
transactions. Currently, if a transaction is disputed as fraud, there are
few ways for a business to prove it is legitimate, which results in billions
of dollars in losses annually due to chargebacks.
Email security is a human issue
Humans will inevitably make mistakes when it comes to phishing emails, but
it is possible to mitigate these risks by ensuring that cyber defense
strategies are at the front and center of business processes, as well as
integrated within company culture. This will ensure teams are made aware of
potential threats before they run the risk of falling victim to them. IT
teams are often expected to take sole responsibility for a company’s
cybersecurity strategy, yet it is impossible for these experts to monitor
the email activity of each employee. With human error cited as a
contributing factor in 95% of breaches, it is important to remember that
email security – alongside many other areas of cyber defense – is a human
issue and each member of the team poses a significant risk. While IT
professionals should take the lead by distributing relevant information
about the latest phishing campaigns targeting their industry, it is also the
responsibility of managerial staff to flag IT concerns in their team
meetings and integrate cybersecurity issues into regular company updates.
These discussions can be started by IT leaders, but the topic of
cybersecurity must be discussed by each department in order to ensure
phishing emails do not fly under the radar.
Key Metrics to Track and Drive Your Agile Devops Maturity
Agile software delivery is a complex process that can hide significant
inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Fortunately the process is easily
measureable as there is a rich digital footprint in the tool-sets used
across the process – from pre-development; development; integration &
deployment; and out into live software management. However surfacing data
from these myriad data sources and synthesising meaningful metrics that
compare ‘apples with apples’ across complex Agile delivery environments is
very tricky. Hence until recently, software delivery metrics have been much
discussed but little used, until the arrival of Value Stream Management and
BI solutions that enable the surfacing of accurate end-to-end software
delivery metrics for the first time. ... Cycle Time is an ideal delivery
metric for early stage practitioners. It simply measures the time taken to
develop an increment of software. Unlike the more comprehensive measure of
Lead Time, Cycle Time is easier to measure as it looks only at the time
taken to take a ticket from the backlog, code and test that ticket – in
preparation for integration and deployment to live.
Quote for the day:
"The litmus test for our success as
Leaders is not how many people we are leading, but how many we are
transforming into leaders" -- Kayode Fayemi
ReplyDeleteMore impressive Blog!!! Its more useful for us...Thanks for sharing with us...
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