Daily Tech Digest - May 15, 2022

Compliance Is A Crucial Part Of Digital Transformation—Here’s How To Achieve It

Staying legally compliant should be a priority for any small or medium-sized business looking to remain up and running. For entrepreneurs or those just entering the business environment, learning and understanding compliance may seem daunting. ... Legal compliance must be a top priority, and hiring the right legal counsel can provide your business with vital information to ensure compliance. Stay updated on state and federal regulations According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), there are a few key areas of compliance businesses should be aware of, including: Internal requirements; Ongoing state filing requirements; Licenses, permits, and recertifications; and Ongoing federal filing requirements. The internet is chock-full of information regarding SMB compliance. It’s also a good idea to consider consulting professional services to help with compliance management. Human resources (HR) professionals are typically well versed in compliance, so use them as resources, too. ... The final tip to remain compliant as an SMB is to use a centralized location for all company communications. Using one platform for all communications makes interactions more efficient and less confusing for employees. 


The Most Important Cybersecurity Step to Implement This Year

In our experience, passwords are prone to user error and difficult to regulate properly. Even complex passwords can be easily bypassed, especially if they’ve been part of a prior security breach. The point is, if a bad actor wants to get into your network, they will target your users’ passwords first -- and very often, they’ll succeed. ... MFA completely changes the password game. Instead of a simple string of text, MFA also requires an additional proof of identity to gain access to an account. Some examples include a PIN sent to your phone, a fingerprint scan, or a mobile authentication app. MFA makes most forms of login credential attacks exponentially harder. In many cases, there’s a 99 percent improvement in your team’s security ... all by adding just a single additional click! There’s really no good reason to ignore MFA. Passwords are so exposed -- and so crucial to identity access management -- that MFA is now a must-have. In fact, MFA is now required by both cyber-insurance providers and multiple compliance standards for government, medical, and manufacturing work. Unless a business employs MFA, renewing cyber-insurance coverage or getting new coverage is often next to impossible these days. It used to be a nice bonus, but now it’s a minimum requirement.


Enterprise Architecture Is A Foundational Skill For The Engineering Students

Nowadays, engineering graduates and post-graduates usually attain a cursory knowledge of Information Technologies and Information Systems during their curriculum as the majority of the educational programs followed in universities are not in conjunction with Business Informatics, which is an integral requirement for today’s digital organizations. There is a demand for professionals who possess in-depth knowledge in both technical and business spheres. They are required to not only manage the development of products efficiently, but also understand the business context and work to improve the business function by aligning IT with business drivers. This is why the Enterprise Architect’s role is increasing in importance to the business and provides an anchor in a sea of change. Before we move on, let’s do due diligence and get to know what Enterprise Architecture is. It is the process by which organizations standardize and organize IT infrastructure to align with the business goals. These strategies support digital transformation, IT growth, and the modernization of IT as a department.


How new API tools are transforming API management

APIs are taking over the world, revolutionizing the way your enterprise organizes IT, and giving you new ways to reach and secure lots of customers. They are powering supply chains and are re-shaping the value chain. According to a recent Nordic APIs statistics roundup, over 90% of developers are using APIs and they spend nearly 30% of their time coding them. This clearly illustrates how important APIs have become for businesses, but also how much impact they have on the workload of IT professionals. In the wake of the massive growth of API adoption there has been a surge in both launches and funding of API-centric start-ups. Many focus on innovating business services like communication services, payment processing, anti-fraud services, banking services etc. Others offer technical capabilities that zoom in on the needs of API providers and consumers - the developers, which begs the question how these tools complement full lifecycle API management solutions like webMethods API Management. Full lifecycle API management supports all stages of an API's lifecycle, from planning and design through implementation and testing to deployment and operation. It is a cornerstone of your digital business capabilities. 


Four use cases defining the new wave of data management

As the public becomes more aware of how AI is used within organizations, greater scrutiny is being placed upon models. Any semblance of bias – particularly as it relates to race, gender or socioeconomic status – has the potential to erase years of goodwill. Yet, even beyond public optics and moral imperatives, being able to trust AI implementations and easily explain why models arrived at certain results in better business decisions. The data fabric helps enable MLOps and Trustworthy AI by establishing trust in data, trust in models and trust in processes. Trust in data is created with the help of many capabilities noted earlier that deliver high-quality data that’s ready for self-service consumption by those who should have access. Trust in models relies upon MLOps-automated data science tools with built in transparency and accountability at each stage of the model lifecycle. Finally, trust in processes through AI governance delivers consistent repeatable processes that assist not only with model transparency and traceability but also time-to-production and scalability.


Data Quality Metrics: Importance and Utilization

Metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) are often confused. Key performance indicators are a way of measuring performance over a period of time, while working toward a specific goal. KPIs supply target goals for teams, and milestones to measure progress. Metrics, on the other hand, uses dimensions to measure the quality of data. It is, unfortunately, easy to use the terms interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Key performance indicators can help developing an organization’s strategy and focus. Metrics is more of a “business as usual” measurement system. A KPI is one kind of metric. ... Business organizations struggle to adapt to the flood of new technologies and data processing techniques. The ability to not only adjust to changing circumstances, but to eclectically embrace the best of those technologies and techniques, can lead to long-term improvements, help to minimize work stress, and increase profits. Using high-quality data for decision-making can be the difference between success and failure. The key goals of a business are to become more profitable and successful, and high data quality can help to achieve those goals.


An In-Depth Guide on the Types of Blockchain Nodes

Full nodes are responsible for maintaining the entire transaction records in a blockchain network. They are regarded as the blockchain’s servers where the data is stored and maintained. There are several governance models of a blockchain that full nodes can come under. If there are any improvements to be made to a blockchain, a majority of full nodes must be ready for it. So, it can be concluded that full nodes are given voting power in order to make any changes in a blockchain. However, certain scenarios can also arise when a change is not implemented even after the majority of full nodes agree to the change. It can happen when a big decision has to be made. ... Pruned nodes are given a specific memory capacity to store data. This means that any number of blocks can be added, but a full node can store only a limited number of bocks. To maintain the ledger, pruned nodes can keep on downloading the block till it reaches the specified limit. Once the limit is attained, the node starts deleting the oldest blocks and making space for new ones in order to maintain the blockchain’s size. 


Crypto-assets and Decentralized Finance: A Primer

There also are a range of other activities—mostly occurring off the blockchain—that are linked to this simplified DeFi structure. These include asset management, automated trading bots, supply of data that are required inputs into conditional smart contracts, and blockchain governance arrangements (such as votes taken to determine the evolving structure of the blockchain). (In the language of DeFi, the suppliers of external data such as asset prices are known as “oracles.”) There also a range of other off-chain providers—including exchanges and app developers—who combine many of these activities to facilitate retail and wholesale access to the DeFi system. To understand the mechanics of DeFi, it is useful to think of a smart contract as a vending machine. After someone identifies the quantity and type of the items they wish, and provides payment, the machine dispenses the desired objects. Indeed, this type of protocol is quite common even in TradFi. For example, crediting accounts with interest payments on a regular schedule requires that the bank’s operations receive signals on the interest rate and the date.


5 reference architecture designs for edge computing

Latency can be a major problem for applications that depend upon real-time access to data. Edge computing, which places computing near the user's or data source's physical location, is a way to deliver services faster and more reliably while gaining flexibility from hybrid cloud computing. This speed is vital in industries such as healthcare, utilities, telecom, and manufacturing. There are three categories of edge use cases: The first is called enterprise edge, and it allows customers to extend application services to remote locations. It has a core enterprise data store located in a datacenter or as a cloud resource. The second is operations edge, which focuses on analyzing inputs in real time (from Internet of Things sensors, for example) to provide immediate decisions that result in actions. For performance reasons, this generally happens onsite. This kind of edge is a place to gather, process, and act on data. The third category is provider edge, which manages a network for others, as in the case of telecommunications service providers. This type of edge focuses on creating a reliable, low-latency network with computing environments close to mobile and fixed users.


Mapping the Future Part 4: Technical Roadmaps

There is a give and take that must be accounted for to align the technical execution with the business planning. This is what makes the technical roadmap so important: It takes the ideas and validates the feasability of them. This give and take is dependent on two constraints: budget and available resources. Budget planning can be difficult. There is always a need to control costs, but at the same time, you need to invest in the future. This is where the strategy and capability roadmap are important. They provide a lens through which the budget decision-making can be performed. The budget limits what can be done. What capabilities are most important to implement? What technologies are truly required to support the capabilities? What is the return on investment? This latter question can be difficult to answer. Traditionally ROI has been analyzed on a per-project basis. But when we are talking about technologies and capabilities, an individual project may cross capabilities, or a capability may require several dependent projects before the ROI is realized.



Quote for the day:

"If a leader loves you, he makes sure you build your house on rock." -- Ugandan Proverb

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