Tag: Cloud
In the digital age, cloud investment is your business’s propulsion, offering flexibility, scalability, and a competitive edge. However, many companies don’t fully reap the cloud’s benefits. The cloud’s potential remains untapped.
So, why is cloud investment crucial, and how does it contribute to a company’s success? Let’s explore! We’ll help you master cloud investment.
The Cloud: More Than a Buzzword!
In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, the cloud isn’t just jargon; it’s your business compass. It’s a dynamic virtual ecosystem transforming operations. But here’s the key point: merely having cloud infrastructure in place is just the starting point.
To truly unlock its potential, you need to understand how to maximize your cloud investment. Whether you’re a startup seeking growth or an enterprise aiming for efficiency, the cloud is your golden ticket to success.
Studies predict the global cloud computing market will surpass $2,321.1 billion by 2032, driven by a consistent 16% CAGR from 2023 to 2032. Companies of all sizes are increasingly recognizing the advantages of cloud technology, and you should, too!
So, let’s dive right in!
Unlocking the Cloud’s Potential
Why don’t some businesses make the most of the cloud? Their approach often holds the key.
Imagine having a sports car with a powerful engine but only using it for leisurely drives. That’s what it means to have cloud technology but not know how to utilize it fully.
Common pitfalls include choosing the wrong cloud model, neglecting data security, failing to optimize costs, and missing out on scalability. These elements can turn your cloud investment into a business powerhouse when managed effectively.
In the following sections, we’ll delve deeper into each area, providing you with a map to unlock your business cloud investment’s full potential.
Know Where You Stand!
Did you know? A staggering 92% of enterprises now utilize multiple cloud services.
Your business’s cloud potential is significant, and your cloud journey is pivotal for your business’s success and growth in today’s digital era. With the right approach, you can unleash the full potential of the cloud, boost efficiency, and drive innovation. Here is how you can know where you stand in your cloud potential
Step 1: Assess Your Current Cloud Environment
The first step in grasping your cloud potential is evaluating your existing cloud setup. Regardless of whether you’ve already transitioned to the cloud or are contemplating it, it’s crucial to gain a clear understanding of your current position.
- Cost Efficiency Metrics: Review your cloud spending. On average, organizations wasted 35% of their cloud budget in 2021.
- Performance Metrics: Measure your cloud infrastructure performance. Downtime carries a significant financial burden. Companies experiencing frequent outages and brownouts incur costs 16 times greater than those with fewer instances of downtime.
- Security and Compliance: Assess your security measures. The average cost of a data breach is $4.45 million.
Step 2: Establish Clear Objectives
Once you’ve gained a comprehensive view of your current cloud environment, it’s time to set precise goals for your cloud strategy. In a 2021 survey conducted by Gartner, a notable 80% of organizations indicated they had either transitioned to a cloud-first strategy, were planning to do so, or were considering it. Your objectives could include:
- Cost Optimization: Trim cloud wastage and streamline spending to enhance cost efficiency.
- Scalability: Ensure that your cloud environment can smoothly adapt to shifts in workload or demand.
- Innovation: Foster innovation by tapping into the cloud’s capabilities for data analytics, AI, and machine learning.
Step 3: Harness Data and Analytics
Data-driven decisions are the linchpin of maximizing your cloud potential. Leverage analytics tools to gain insights into your cloud usage and performance. This approach can assist you in spotting trends and identifying areas that require improvement.
Large enterprises are now prioritizing cloud adoption, aiming to move 60% of their operations to the cloud by 2025, underscoring the critical role of data-driven decision-making in business.
Step 4: Seek Expert Guidance
Do not hesitate to seek guidance from cloud experts on your cloud journey. Organizations achieve greater success in realizing their cloud goals when they have access to cloud experts. Collaborate with cloud service providers, managed service providers, or cloud consultants to navigate the cloud landscape effectively.
Step 5: Continuously Monitor and Adapt
Cloud technology is continually evolving. Routinely monitor your cloud environment and adapt to changes. This iterative process is pivotal in making the most of your cloud investment.
Now let’s understand why is embracing the cloud vital for future-readiness.
Read more: Cloud Application Development: Empowering Your Business in the Digital Era!
Why Embrace the Cloud for Future Readiness
In our dynamic business world, cloud adoption is more than a choice; it’s a strategic necessity. Let’s explore some reasons:
- Scalability and Flexibility: As your business grows, you can seamlessly adjust your cloud resources to meet increased demand. This flexibility ensures that you’re prepared to adapt to changing market conditions and accommodate rapid expansion.
- Cost Efficiency: The cloud allows you to pay only for the resources you use. This eliminates the need for heavy upfront investments in hardware and reduces operational costs. A well-managed cloud strategy can result in significant cost savings, which is vital for long-term sustainability.
- Innovation Acceleration: Cloud platforms offer a plethora of tools and services for data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Leveraging these capabilities can spark innovation, drive competitiveness, and enable your business to stay at the forefront of your industry.
- Global Reach: Cloud services allow businesses to reach customers and partners around the world. This global accessibility is crucial for international expansion and remaining competitive in a global marketplace.
- Security and Compliance: By migrating to the cloud, you can benefit from their expertise and state-of-the-art security protocols, enhancing your ability to protect sensitive data and adhere to industry regulations.
- Competitive Edge: Access to cutting-edge technology and the ability to swiftly respond to market changes can be differentiators in a crowded marketplace.
- Sustainability: Cloud providers are increasingly focused on sustainable practices. By migrating to the cloud, your business can reduce its carbon footprint through more energy-efficient data centers and shared resources.
How Can Fingent Help in Your Cloud Journey?
At Fingent, we understand that each business’s cloud journey is unique. We are committed to helping you unlock the full potential of your cloud investment. With a deep understanding of cloud technologies and a proven track record in cloud consulting, we offer:
Tailored Solutions: We’ll work closely with you to understand your business needs and provide customized solutions that align with your objectives.
Expert Guidance: Our team of cloud experts is always ready to assist you at every stage of your cloud journey, ensuring a smooth transition and ongoing success.
Innovation and Efficiency: We leverage the latest cloud technologies to drive innovation, enhance efficiency, and optimize costs, helping your business thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
So, take the plunge, make the most of your business cloud investment, and watch your business soar to new heights. The cloud is your oyster; it’s time to unlock its treasures! Give us a call today.
- Companies can save 20% of the total annual cost if they migrate to the cloud.
- Hyperscaler Cloud Services can enable businesses to experiment, build, innovate, and run any form of application.
- Hyperscaler adds immense value when creating custom software applications with a specified focus on the data center hardware and software needs.
Organizations of a variety of sizes are now able to reinvent how they operate and move more quickly and more agilely, thanks to the cloud. The move to the cloud has fundamentally changed how we perform our jobs, communicate, and interact. It is quickly becoming a requirement to be competitive in today’s digital environment.
Custom software applications powered by the cloud are a force to be reckoned with, and the benefits become manifold with hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google. What are these hyperscalers, and how can they supercharge your business? Let’s find out.
What are Cloud Services?
In very simple terms, cloud computing is access to computer services such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence, and more by means of the cloud (the Internet). With cloud computing, you can store and access data and programs on remote services hosted on the internet rather than the computer’s hard drive or local server. Cloud computing can be done with cloud services, which are essentially software programs that are hosted by third-party providers who make them available to users over the internet.
Studies recently revealed that, on a worldwide scale, 94% of all companies will use some kind of cloud computing service in 2023 to help them run their business operations. This is a 14% jump from 2020.
A major reason for this wide shift from on-premises servers of the companies to cloud providers is the ‘Pay as you go’ service offered by them, meaning that you only have to pay for the service that you are utilizing. However, the cloud offers more, much more!
How Does the Cloud Work and How Does it Benefit Businesses?
Just like any other IT solution, cloud services also rely on hardware and software. Users typically need just a computer, a stable internet connection, and operating systems to access cloud services.
Benefits To Businesses:
- Cost Reduction: This is a major factor that makes this technology desirable. On average, 20% of the total annual cost can be saved by companies if they migrate to the cloud.
- More Storage: Many tools are available on the cloud with the sole purpose of providing more storage capacity. Some examples include Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud Drive.
- Higher Security Barricades: Another attractive feature of cloud services is their tight security regulations. A report by Salesforce states that 94% of businesses claimed to have seen an improvement in security after adopting cloud services.
Read more: Advance your business software development with Cloud Native. Download the complete 451 Research now and strategize a successful Cloud Native adoption process.
Hyperscalers: What Are They, And How Do They Add Value To Cloud Services?
Hyperscaler got its name from the data processing method known as “hyperscale computing,” which allows software architecture to expand and scale on an enterprise level. Hyperscalers enable their clients to experiment, build, innovate, and run any form of application—from a social network to a smart city to online banking—while controlling costs and operating with agility by offering users access to a ready-made, scalable infrastructure. Some famous examples of hyperscalers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These technologies combined are reported to have an estimated 65% control over the cloud market.
Benefits Of Hyperscaler Cloud Services:
- Scalability: They can provide virtually unlimited computing resources, which enables organizations to scale their services and applications swiftly without worrying about hardware constraints.
- Global Availability: Users can easily access content with lower latency through hyperscalers, which boosts efficiency and user satisfaction.
- Security: Hyperscaler clouds provide a high level of security by frequently investing in infrastructure reliability, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity.
Value Added By The Big Three: AWS, Azure, and Google
Let’s now talk about these three hyperscalers:
AWS: Four primary elements of value—cost savings, employee productivity, operational resilience, and business agility—are measured and tracked by AWS to assist enterprises in developing an in-depth case for the cloud.
Azure: Azure is the only consistent hybrid cloud that delivers exceptional developer productivity, offers extensive, multi-layered security, including the most conformity coverage of any cloud provider, and costs less than AWS.
Google: Google’s solution provides a complete data foundation for unifying all workloads and overseeing the entire data life cycle. It can process data anywhere and is designed with and for AI, so you can obtain the most up-to-date tools for machine learning analysis, prompting, adjusting, training, and deploying unique foundation models—all while being connected to your business data.
How Can Custom Software Applications Benefit From These Hyperscalers?
Hyperscalers generally oversee the in-house technical skills of an IT team needed to customize data center hardware and software in accordance with the company’s business model and applications. This adds immense value when creating custom software applications.
AWS:
AWS offers many tools you can use to build custom SaaS applications and third-party SaaS solutions.
- Cognito: enables organizations to provide extra sign-in alternatives to their users.
- AD Connector: adds an extra degree of security.
- Quicksight: is a BI solution that you can use to provide simple insights to the people who work with you.
- Cost Explorer: displays and analyzes your costs and operations.
- Aurora Serverless: takes care of routine database chores, including provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair.
Azure:
Azure services can assist you throughout the process of custom software application planning, development, delivery, and operations.
- Github: It is a programming solution for collaboration and version control that allows you and others to work on projects from anywhere in the world.
- Azure Pipelines: Works with any language or platform and is used to simultaneously deploy services to multiple targets.
- Azure Boards: This tool lets teams organize, monitor, and talk about their work across the whole development cycle.
- Azure Monitor: This helps improve the responsiveness and availability of your services and apps.
- Visual Studio: This can be used to connect applications and services to Azure and create services that operate in the Azure cloud.
Google:
To help you create high-quality apps as quickly and dependably as possible, Google provides a wide range of resources.
- Firebase: It is used for cloud communications, performance monitoring, and authentication validation.
- Web: It offers information to assist you in enhancing your site’s organization, how it appears in Google searches, and the effectiveness of its user interface.
- The Cloud: Here, you can access services like BigQuery (for processing large, ready-only data sets), Compute Engine, and Cloud Storage.
- Tensor Flow: This tool is mostly used for machine learning and gives developers access to a variety of workflows and high-level, logical APIs to build machine learning models in a variety of languages.
Why Should You Choose Fingent?
Fingent is one of the top providers of technology solutions around the globe right now, serving customers from four different continents. To assist you with your projects, we provide top client-centered personnel who can help you with any of the three types of Cloud services – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
With our team of experts, you can scale up or down as you need and manage and integrate cloud environments according to your business needs. We provide excellent pre- and post-development support by monitoring performance and making any necessary adjustments, and we are accessible at any level of development.
Give us a call, and let’s talk about how to get your business to succeed on the cloud.
For more than a decade, businesses in all industries have undergone a digital metamorphosis. This evolution is marked by a transition from on-premises software solutions to cloud-based computing technology.
By leveraging cloud-computing resources, businesses can gain access to scalable assets, increase organizational performance, and optimize digital agility.
It’s a mistake to think about cloud solutions primarily as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. While these technologies are a valuable component of business modernization, they’re only the tip of the iceberg.
Businesses that create their own cloud-native applications can truly harness the power of discrete cloud technologies to deliver long-lasting competive advantages. As their name implies, cloud-native applications are “native” to the cloud computing environment. In other words, cloud-native software development involves creating applications in components optimized for deployment in the cloud instead of a physical computing environment.
What Is Cloud-Native Development?
In simple terms, cloud-native software development is the process of creating applications using core cloud-computing principles and resources. The architecture of cloud-native applications is highly scalable, responsive, and dynamic.
Cloud-native applications are designed to be deployed and run in cloud computing environments, and as such, they offer a number of benefits to developers. Some of the advantages of developing cloud-native applications include:
- Scalability: Cloud-native applications can easily (and often automatically) scale up or down to meet changing demand with consistent performance levels, making them well-suited for applications with fluctuating usage patterns.
- High availability: Cloud-native applications can be designed to be highly available, meaning they can withstand failures and continue to function even in the event of a hardware or software failure.
- Elasticity and Agile development: Using independent microservices isolates the effects of changes, making it easier for developers to iterate on their products and respond to customer needs.
- Cost efficiency: By leveraging the economies of scale offered by cloud providers, businesses can reduce their infrastructure costs and invest in building and improving their applications.
- Integration with cloud services: Cloud-native applications can easily integrate with other cloud-based services, such as databases, messaging systems, and analytics tools, which can simplify development and improve the functionality of the application.
Overall, the main advantage of cloud-native applications is that they are designed to take full advantage of the capabilities of cloud computing environments, which can help developers build and deploy applications more quickly, efficiently, and at lower costs.
Additionally, many cloud-native applications are “cloud-agnostic,” meaning they can be run on a range of cloud providers (hyperscalers) or function in multi-cloud environments. Much of the appeal of cloud-native software development lies in the ability to yield adaptable and versatile applications. Sometimes applications can benefit from services that are only available from certain cloud providers, which risks “vendor lockin,” so it pays to consider the trade-offs carefully.
Read more: Can Moving to Cloud Native Improve Business Agility?
Why Modern Businesses Need Cloud-Native Development
Like on-premises computing resources, software created with traditional application-development practices are bound by the limits of that technology. As such, they can’t provide the quality of experience that modern audiences expect.
Additionally, applications developed in an old-school environment often need re-factoring to try to match the performance of cloud-native alternatives when the former is introduced to a cloud environment.
By leveraging cloud-native development services, modern businesses can facilitate their digital transformation on a faster time horizon. Cloud-native processes enable businesses to serve their customers better and deliver a frictionless user experience.
Top businesses in virtually all industries leverage cloud-native development. Those that neglect to do so will fall further behind these trailblazers and find it challenging to maintain a foothold within their respective markets.
Adopting cloud-native processes is no longer an optional step—it’s become necessary for businesses that want to thrive in the digital marketplace.
Top Benefits of Cloud-Native Software Development
Your business can tap into the multiple benefits of investing in cloud-native software development. Specifically, your organization can:
1. Streamline the User Experience (UX)
When the goal of cloud native is to develop applications that can serve your business while adjusting to the speed of changing technology, the end user is always the priority.
Because of the improved speed of development and the ability to make changes during the development process, cloud native puts UX first. While there are many ways to enhance the UX, investing in cloud-native development is one of the most effective approaches.
2. Improves Development Strategy
Cloud-native applications enable developers to leverage two essential UX-centric methodologies: continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
Continuous integration is the process of merging code changes using automation. Multiple developers can merge code changes into a centralized project to streamline app development and generate a cohesive, fully functional product.
Continuous delivery addresses post-release application software updates. Instead of occasionally pushing out massive updates, CD involves delivering smaller updates more frequently. This short-cycle approach improves software delivery and performance while yielding a super UX.
Moreover, microservices can be easier to implement with quality assurance automation, which elevates achievable levels of code quality.
3. Protect Business Continuity
Making dynamic, user-friendly applications a central part of your business model can give you a competitive edge in the modern marketplace. However, if your application goes down, customer frustrations will mount, and your brand could experience lasting reputational damage as a result.
Since cloud-native apps can tap into stand-alone, scalable cloud resources, these products are far less likely to experience extended outages due to spiking utilization. Developers can more rapidly isolate and remedy the issue, as well as rapidly test changes when a cloud-native app experiences downtime, thereby protecting business continuity.
4. Meet Evolving Demands for Services
In the digitized marketplace, it seems as if customers’ expectations and demands are in a constant state of flux. Unfortunately, it can be difficult — if not impossible — to pivot rapidly using legacy application development processes.
Cloud-native architectures can give your organization the agility it needs to respond to sudden shifts in customer expectations. For instance, you could add a new feature that enables customers to communicate easily with your brand. You could also frequently update your app’s capabilities to improve overall performance and stay relevant in the digital marketplace.
Read more: Cloud-Native Application Development: How It’s Powering App Delivery
When Should Businesses Shift to Cloud-Native?
The short answer is “yesterday.”
In the long run, cloud-native software development outperforms traditional application development practices at every turn. Cloud-native development reduces risk, has broader scalability, and allows developers to make changes more quickly. Most notably, the speed of delivery is far and above one of the most compelling advantages of shifting to a cloud-native approach.
Your organization is undoubtedly using cloud-based computing resources in at least some capacity. You can complete the transition by modernizing your cloud-native development processes, too. Doing so will empower your business to regain a competitive edge within your respective industry.
At the same time, one should consider the downsides of cloud applications. Some cloud-native applications can be more complex than traditional applications, due to the need to integrate with multiple cloud-based services and manage distributed systems. This can create more opportunities for something to fail.
While cloud native applications can be cost-effective they can also be more expensive than traditional applications in certain situations, particularly if they require a large number of resources or if they have high usage patterns.
The Nexus Between Cloud-Native Development and Business Modernization
Today’s customers want the freedom to interact with brands across multiple touchpoints. This holds true whether your target audience consists of individual consumers or business-to-business (B2B) clients.
Modern businesses live up to this customer expectation by providing their clients access to user-friendly, intuitive, and dynamic applications. These organizations can expand their reach in the digital marketplace, connect with a broader audience, eliminate friction from purchasing processes, and generate more revenue, all by transitioning to cloud-native development.
Conventional, monolithic application development practices often present a significant hurdle to large-scale integrations, digital transformation and business modernization efforts. Your business can’t achieve its digital transformation goals without fully embracing the cloud-computing environment and its many resources.
Examining the Business Impact of Cloud-Native
The notion that cloud-native software development is the new gold standard isn’t just pure conjecture. This fact is supported by numerous case studies and research projects, including a recent business impact brief by 451 Research.
In the brief, the organization’s team reported that:
- 64% of companies develop at least half of their applications using cloud-native technology
- 49% of companies have partially or fully adopted Kubernetes
- 55% of companies have partially or completely adopted containers
451 Research analysts concluded that cloud-native software development has gone beyond the development process and evolved into a full-fledged methodology. As such, it should continue gaining momentum among brands passionate about actualizing digital transformation.
And that’s just the barest overview. Managers can review 451 Research’s business impact brief by downloading the report.
Why Choose Fingent for Cloud-Native Development?
Fingent’s suite of cloud-native software development services is designed to deliver maximum value to our clients. When leveraging Fingent’s cloud-native development services, your organization will experience:
- Consistent, High-Quality Results: As a client-oriented cloud-native development firm, Fingent focuses on providing high-quality, consistent results that exceed expectations. Our robust, agile teams and dynamic quality assurance practices ensure that our deliverables expressly meet your needs and address your most significant organizational pain points.
- Best-of-Breed Solutions: Fingent’s unique approach enables us to provide world-class cloud-native software development services that produce best-of-breed solutions. These cost-effective solutions will align with your budget and delivery timetable. With Fingent, you won’t have any last-minute surprises like budgeting issues or missed deadlines.
- Prebuilt Services: Fingent’s talented team can build truly custom solutions for your organization. However, we can also expedite development by leveraging prebuilt frameworks, applications, and microservices for common functions that are a staple of virtually all industries. Some of these prebuilt services include cognitive AI, shipment, and payment service functions.
- Pay-as-You-Go Models: With Fingent, you can transition away from speculative technology spending — that is, purchasing new machines and acquiring more infrastructure in anticipation that you will succeed. While it’s important to believe in your business and plan for its success, tying up resources on unneeded equipment for months or years will only harm your bottom line. But Fingent enables you to break the cycle of speculative spending and rely more on operational expenses (OPEX). Instead of letting new hardware gather dust in the data center until its eventual use, you can access additional servers on-demand via a cloud-native infrastructure.
- Scalability: As your business grows, you must have the flexibility to support additional users at a moment’s notice. However, scaling IT capabilities can too time-consuming, and costly if you are limited by monolithic software architectures.Take advantage of Fingent’s expertise to create your cloud-native capabilities that are able to support more users in more locations, all while accommodating a dynamic array of devices.
- Speed of Delivery: Fingent can help you stay on top by providing an expedited speed of delivery via cloud-native solutions. Skip the need to field a development team with the right mix of skills but assigning your project to Fingent. We facilitate an accelerated speed of delivery by shifting away from a “big bang” approach to project management when practical and instead focusing on achieving meaningful milestones across the project’s development life. We have the deep bench of personnel needed to keep projects moving ahead at the optimal speed.
- Transparent Project Management: At Fingent, we always keep our clients in the loop. We’ll routinely provide you with updates regarding the status of your cloud-native development project. We pride ourselves on setting firm deadlines and adhering to them.
If you’re ready to achieve business modernization and make your organization a standout player in your industry, take advantage of Fingent’s cloud-native services. Contact us to discuss your latest project.
Shifting From Cybersecurity to Cyber Resilience – How Are They Different From Each Other!
Cyberattacks are hitting the headlines with increasing frequency. Data breaches and attacks are currently inevitable parts of running an organization. Cybercriminals are adept at using phishing, malware, or insider threats to infiltrate infrastructure and steal confidential information.
Businesses that compromise their cybersecurity face more than just the loss of confidential data. Cybersecurity breaches can affect a business’s market value, jeopardize the brand reputation and compromise competitiveness. The effects of a single cyber-attack can be permanent and devastating.
How do you combat this era of over-smart cyber criminals? You need more than cyber security. What you need is cyber resilience!
Are you wondering what the best way to protect your company from within and without is? Do you want to secure your business in this volatile economic atmosphere?
If YES is your answer, please continue reading to find out why shifting from cybersecurity to cyber resilience is necessary.
Why Has It Become Necessary to Shift from Cybersecurity to Cyber Resilience
Pandemics are not the only calamities from which a business needs to build resiliency. Any unforeseen event, be it a natural calamity, a shift in the economy, or anything else, needs to be part of comprehensive disaster recovery planning.
Such unforeseen events provide many risk-based opportunities to pivot in response to risk. Chief among these is digital transformation. Here are four risk-based opportunities that make it necessary to shift from cybersecurity to cyber resilience.
1. Strategic risks: Included among many others are business continuity, reputational hazard, competition, insurance legal risks, and more. If these risks are not mitigated in time, they can affect organizational sustainability.
2. Financial risks: Financial risks have implications for regulators, tax complexities, and employee outsourcing.
3. Operational risks: Operational risks include organizational and digital functions, from employee well-being to AI and robotics. It can affect the business process and all those involved.
4. Remote work: This can easily expose an organization to cyber threats.
If an organization becomes a target of persistent cyber threats, its networks will likely be compromised. That is why businesses must be ready.
Cyber resilience allows an organization to minimize the impact of persistent threats. It lowers the probability of a successful attack and minimizes the damage if the attack is successful.
Read more: A Detailed Whitepaper On – Is Cyber Resilience Over Taking Cybersecurity for Good?
How Are They Different From Each Other?
1. Cyber security-the mighty wall
Cyber security is about reacting to a cyber-attack while cyber resilience is about anticipating a possible attack.
Cyber security is about technologies and processes designed to shield computer systems, networks, and data from cyber threats.
For example, when an empire wants to prevent security breaches, it might first build a huge, robust wall. If it feels that is not sufficient, it may construct another wall that is higher than the existing wall and perhaps add a ditch.
Can such measures completely protect an empire from a breach? Well, history has a different story to tell.
Cyber security is somewhat like that wall. It is more focused on preventing hackers from breaching ITs’ security wall. While it may prevent the majority of attacks, a hacker can still find ways to breach that mighty wall when the landscape changes. Despite all measures, an organization may be still vulnerable to a cyber-attack.
Read more: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: The Cyber Security Heroes of FinTech!
2. Cyber resilience-an ever-equipped and ever-prepared tech-ninja
The goal of cyber resilience is to anticipate, withstand, and adapt. It depends on the theory of “when there is a cyber-attack,” not “if there is a cyber-attack.”
A cyber resilient business is like a ninja, able to respond and recover from a cyber-attack. Such a business can continue to operate through the attack, and eventually, get back on track and become more capable of withstanding future disruptions.
It helps organizations to foresee hackers’ activities and be informed about the possible threats they pose. This way organizations are prepared to prevent and protect, defend and respond successfully to any attacks.
Cyber resilience is not just a security measure. It is a cultural shift – a full-time task that applies security best practices to defend an organization’s networks and systems. here are five key areas:
- Prepare: Preparation is key to success! Hence, to prevent cyber-attacks an organization requires a multi-layered approach. This includes technology, people, and processes. Cyber resilience involves having comprehensive security policies and providing training and in-work support to ensure that all involved know their role.
- Protect: In addition to basic security software, more sophisticated solutions like endpoint detection and response solution provide a greater degree of protection. Security awareness training and data protection layers offer even greater cyber resilience levels.
- Durability: Building durability into an organization is one of the end goals of cyber resilience. Adopting a single platform for data and content can make it easier to protect an organization as a breach can be identified quickly and quarantined before it affects other sections. All this while, employees can continue to access other systems and data.
- Recovery: Resilience means rising every time we fall. Cyber resilience means returning to normal no matter what. To avoid a complete halt to all business operations, an effective data backup and recovery is essential. Automated, granular backup and recovery of data to a separate network will enable businesses to quickly restore data that may have been seized or wiped.
- Adapt: According to a writer, adaptability is the simple secret of survival! And that is a key component of cyber resilience. Security solutions that leverage up-to-the-minute threat intelligence ensures that a network can adapt automatically to the latest threats. This sort of intelligence allows you to understand the current threats and make accurate predictions about likely attacks in the future.
Read more: Redefining Cyber Security Needs With AI!
ACT and not REACT
Data and infrastructural security are the topmost concern of every organization. Active and continuous protection is a must for tools and techniques. This is also why investing in cyber resilience can never go wrong in any condition.
Cyber resilience equips businesses with technical know-how in order to prepare for the worst and ensures it can deliver in the worst situations.
Cyber resilience involves a change of mindset. It is also about security operating within the organization and beyond. It is only by thinking of overall network resiliency that businesses can surmount existing threats, and overcome future threats.
Security experts at Fingent have their finger on the pulse of the digital world and know how to nip cyber threats in the bud and keep your business resilient from attacks. This means that you leave your cyber worries in our hands with the confidence that it will be dealt with effectively.
Call us and let’s discuss your security needs and how we can fulfill them.
Reinventing. Transforming. Scaling – that is what Cloud Native can mean for businesses today!
Cloud-Native can help businesses achieve phenomenal success and improve their ability to deliver more features faster to their customers. It can bring in a major competitive advantage.
This technology increases the velocity of the business and the method to structure their teams to take advantage of automation and scalability.
Are you a business that is starting a digital transformation journey? Or are you wondering what Cloud Native is and why you need it?
This blog describes the advantages of Cloud Native capabilities to speed up your productivity and increase your company’s innovation output. It also discusses upcoming trends to look for.
Read more: Unlocking Opportunities with Cloud Continuum!
Can Moving to a Cloud-Native Approach Improve Business Agility?
Most organizations today are in the midst of a massive data transformation to out-innovate their rivals. The Cloud Native approach allows organizations to build modern applications by leveraging its benefits based on the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Here is how moving to a Cloud-Native approach improves your business agility:
1. Increased Reusability Reduces Development Costs
Moving to the Cloud Native approach enables developers to build apps that function like building blocks that can be used later for other projects. It makes it easier for developers to access and reuse components created for earlier projects.
How does this improve business agility?
- Simplified development process: Instead of spending time on building the common framework, developers can spend more time on a project’s specifics. This means they can develop more sophisticated applications in less time.
- Faster delivery: All deliveries are time-sensitive. A cloud-native approach enables you to seize the time-sensitive opportunity by reducing the time to market.
- Testing made simple: Cloud-Native uses microservices that present fewer problems. When the load on the pipeline is lightened, the testing is simplified.
2. Better Customer Experience
Two types of customers are affected by the Cloud Native approach – external customers (those who purchase from you) and internal customers (those development teams).
- Internal customer: Your internal customers or the development teams maintain and manage the systems that your external customers use. Fostering agility in your internal teams improves employee engagement and in turn rewards external customers. Developers are smart people who want to spend their time solving complex problems instead of focusing on just ‘keeping things running.’ The Cloud Native approach automates predictable problems, making better use of your internal team. This allows them to focus more on driving innovation.
- External customers: Building and delivering solutions in response to customer needs will attract and retain customers, in effect building enduring success. Cloud-Native helps find and fix problems faster. It is especially beneficial to businesses with apps that required frequent updates. Cloud-Native gives you a reliable way to deliver those updates in a seamless, resource-efficient manner. This means there is little or no disruption of services during updates while improving responsiveness to the demand they might have.
3. Improved Business Continuity
Downtime can be detrimental to a business’s survival. However, Cloud Native offers a remedy to this. Moving to Cloud-Native keeps operations lean enough to survive whatever turn the market takes.
It also improves business continuity and aids in disaster recovery as it reduces downtime and increases resource availability. It allows employees to work from any location and enables integrated and automated backups. It can also unify processes on a single interface and improve visibility.
4. Ability to respond to shifting market demands
Cloud-Native is a significant means of spotting an opportunity a moment before a competitor. It provides businesses the ability to respond in hours to sudden changes in the market.
Cloud-Native apps are ideal instruments in turbulent or hypercompetitive markets. Whether a business needs new ways to connect with customers or is undergoing digital transformations, Cloud Native apps enable them to take advantage of sudden opportunities in the market.
Read more: Cloud-Native Application Development: How It’s Powering App Delivery
A Look into The Cloud Native Upcoming Trends
Here are the most relevant Cloud-Native trends businesses can watch out for:
1. Serverless Computing
Serverless computing is a next-gen technology that ensures agility, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. Essentially, it is a new way of running applications and services that enables developers to focus on building customer-centric applications and optimizing application design.
The operational cost of serverless computing is much lower as it enables IT and development teams to work together. It allows them to share the responsibility of developing and maintaining a product.
2. Distributed Cloud or Multicloud
Another noteworthy trend is the adoption of distributed cloud. It is a method that combines the benefits of the public cloud with an organization’s ability to maintain governance of the infrastructure.
Distributed cloud or Multicloud allows businesses to use the infrastructure of multiple cloud providers simultaneously. You can leave IT management to the providers by deciding the location of the individual services and data archives.
3. Composable application
In the future, businesses will have to free themselves from the rigid divisional barriers that are not compatible with the flexibility of organizations.
A composable application will allow for a more modern software design and organization model. This will allow businesses to quickly create and dispose of the features that are according to the specific business needs.
4. Law-code or No-code
The ability to perform multiple business operations with minimum dependency on the technology team is key to business growth and sustainability.
Using Kubernetes, organizations can create flexible solutions that extensively use low-code or no-code tools. Given that, the non-technical team is free to focus on their roles without specific programming skills.
Read more: A Comprehensive Guide To Modern Cloud Application Development
Become Future Ready
The Cloud Native approach proposes a truly effective model and makes business innovation through the integration of applications.
To embrace the benefits of the cloud, be ready to embrace changes within your entire project lifecycle. In other words, adopting Cloud Native applications means being ready to welcome future developments in cloud services.
It means opening the doors to opportunities for the future digital business. The cloud-native approach not only helps business innovate faster but help them react to marketplace events with more agility. Wondering how to make this happen for your business?
Let’s have a chat!
Technology trust is a good thing. Traditional approaches focused on establishing a strong perimeter to keep the bad guys out are no longer enough. In today’s digital world, Zero Trust Security is an approach that is essential for every business that has an online presence. Zero trust is a holistic and strategic approach to security that verifies every person and device that is granted access and confirms who and what they say they are. This blog explains why there is an increasing need for app security and 7 reasons why businesses need the Zero Trust Security paradigm.
Is There an Increased Need for App Security?
Cloud environments host business-critical applications and data, making them vulnerable to attack by hackers who would like to steal, destroy, or hold hostage sensitive data for personal gain. Though the security strategy is not perfect, Zero Trust reduces the attack surface and limits the impact and severity of the attack.
Functionalities in an application increase its vulnerability to an attack and the frequency of the attacks also increases. Identifying vulnerabilities and security threats early on can save a lot of time and money for businesses. App security lowers the number of vulnerabilities, increases efficiency, and improves the speed of detection and time-to-fix.
Watch now: How InfinCE – an infinite cloud platform, is empowering industries with secured next-gen cloud technology!
7 Reasons Why Businesses Need Zero Trust Security
Zero Trust limits the scope of damage if credentials are compromised, or if the firewall is breached. This paradigm secures remote work better than conventional methods. It improves productivity and organizational agility. Here are additional reasons to consider:
1. Increased Cyberattacks
When organizations rely on a single sign-on (SS)) verification method, ensuring people are who they say are may become difficult and risky. To avoid this security gap, SSO should be balanced with other technologies like Multi-factor Authentication (MFA).
In the last few years, MFA has become easier and smarter. While SSO and MFA together create a tight web of security around an organization, they fail to provide a smooth end-user experience.
That is where Zero Trust Security comes in. Zero Trust is based on the assumption that “nothing” and “nobody” are to be trusted. Using AI and ML in Zero Trust models, organizations can start to learn the normal behavior of their employees. These enable organizations to detect any deviation from their regular pattern and block an employee’s access until he is being verified.
2. Cybersecurity Workforce Outpace Supply
The success of Zero Trust depends on continual monitoring and analytics. When you use automation to evaluate access requests you can judge those requests based on the key identifiers and then automatically grant access. The IT department need not be involved in approving each access request, but look into it only when the automated system flags requests as suspicious.
How can this be of significant benefit? According to Cybersecurity Workforce Study, 2021, 60% of the participants reported that the shortage of cybersecurity staffing is placing their organization at risk. Despite the influx of 70,000 professionals into the cybersecurity workforce, global demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to outpace supply. So, if you can safely automate, you can reduce human resources, and your existing team can devote their time to innovation and improvement.
3. Heightened Security Measure Require More Security Teams
The Zero Trust optimizes your existing security team because it uses a centralized monitoring system. With it, your team can easily generate reliable data and gain insights. As a result, you can maintain a more secure environment even with reduced security staff.
4. Cloud Environment Require Shared Cybersecurity Responsibility
Businesses are moving their critical applications and workloads to the public or hybrid cloud. Given that, cybersecurity leaders must reconsider the security measures they have in place. The cloud environment requires a shared responsibility model. In the Zero Trust model, certain security aspects are provided by the cloud vendor, and others are cared for by the enterprise.
Read more: Why Is Cloud Security Important What Are The Best Practices to Ensure Cloud Security
5. Network Is No Longer a Secured Enterprise Network
Work From Home has necessitated intense use of the cloud. This means the internet network is no more secure. The conventional security measures and visibility solutions are no longer practical or robust enough. Zero Trust rests on the foundation of the “always-verify” principle. It offers complete visibility both in data centers and the cloud.
6. Everyone Need Not Have Elevated Security Privileges
In this digital-first age, users who access an enterprises’ applications and infrastructure are not just employees or customers. Vendors who are servicing a system, suppliers, or partners could also be accessing privileged data.
None of these non-employees need such access. What more, not all employees need access to every application, infrastructure, or business data. A well-executed Zero Trust strategy enables businesses to precisely control access based on key dimensions of trust.
7. Work From Home Increases Security Risks
In the post-pandemic era, Work From Home (WFH) has become the new normal. Location-based security technologies like the company’s headquarters are no longer relevant. Unsecured wi-fi networks and devices increase security risks. Assuming that their employee’s WFH setups and environments are not as secure as the office, businesses must depend on the overreaching system like a Zero Trust framework.
Work devices are traditionally managed, patched, and kept up-to-date with security tools and policies, not so with BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices). Some employees may forget basic cyber hygiene skills. The Zero Trust Security can control the potential for a security breach as it enforces access controls at every point within the network.
Watch now: Shifting to a remote work environment? Learn why InfinCE makes the best remote work companion!
Adopt Zero Trust Security
Zero Trust Security paradigm ensures each request undergoes evaluation based on micro-segmentation of user types, location, and other identifying parameters. Only after such intense scrutiny does it determine when to trust, what to grant access to, and how long that access should be enabled.
Zero Trust Security returns immediate gains through risk reduction and security control. But there is more. It improves visibility, increases productivity, makes better use of your IT resources, and facilities compliance. In a nutshell, Zero Trust Security helps your organization build strength and resilience.
Decision-makers and security leaders of an enterprise should consider leveraging robust layers of defense through the Zero Trust model. Zero Trust Security tightens controls over access to information through network perimeters and the implementation of strict authentication measures.
Security experts at Fingent are working with the Zero Trust model and have honed their skills in providing bulletproof security for our clients’ systems and networks. Give us a call and see how we can help you.
The entire world is grappling with the scare of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the uncertainty of the pandemic, Human Resources departments across the globe went into overdrive to map out all possibilities that employees would undergo. Previously, HR departments were concerned with compensation, compliance, and benefits. However, with changing times, their role as HR professionals evolved. Today they are supporting the greatest assets of their company: Employees!
Beyond hiring and growth, HR professionals are now seen as strategic partners for every department within an organization. The resilience of an organization and its people depends on the strength of the HR department. It plays a vital role in boosting the economy. HR professionals cushion the sudden shift in workplace culture and equip the team for the future of work.
The pandemic has suddenly brought in industrial shifts. Understanding these shifts is the key that helps in keeping pace with the rapid developments across the organization. That is why HR professionals are called the pulse of any organization. However, this is not easy as they face several challenges.
Read more: Why Develop a Custom Platform for Remote Employee Hiring and Onboarding?
HR Professionals Face Increasing Challenges
In a remote work setting, technology continues to have a direct impact on the day-to-day work of employees. So, HR leaders must plan their technology investments more carefully than ever before.
Additionally, HR professionals may face challenges from their employers and employees whom they serve. Hence, HR personnel must identify upcoming challenges. This will help them to use technology to facilitate more informed decisions faster. Here are a few challenges:
1. Recruiting and retaining employees
Employers must hire candidates with an appropriate degree, skills, and experience. Plus, these candidates must be a good fit with the organizational culture. Once a candidate is hired it is important to retain the best worker through a successful employee engagement approach.
2. Bridging the gap between the employer and the employee
It is important to ensure that a qualified candidate does not slip through the cracks. This job needs to be thorough, requiring HR professionals’ full attention. This is also time-sensitive because the talent could be easily snatched by a competition.
Hence HR professionals need technology that can streamline the process of job postings, interview scheduling, hiring workflows for more efficient results. It should also improve accuracy and save the time of HR and applicants alike.
3. Pressured for faster decision-making
Most companies rely on data to make key operational decisions. To make informed decisions they must identify areas of exposure to and devise effective solutions. The pandemic showed us all that the work environment can change suddenly without warning. Hence, HR professionals need to have new information at their fingertips to predict the effect of change on their organization and make needed changes quickly to ensure the survival of their company.
Read more: Top 5 Organizational Imperatives for Business Leaders to Become Winners in the New Normal
Must-Have Technology Trends for the Efficient Functioning of an HR Department
Some technologies have emerged as a response to the pandemic. Even so, these may continue to be long-term shifts in the current and future workplace. These new technologies may help an organization stay resilient and better equipped to adapt to future crises.
1. Cloud talent management
Nowadays, HR professionals depend on multiple solutions to automate hiring, onboarding, performance evaluation, and more. Cloud-based HR tools give all members of the team access to relevant workplace data at any given time.
Cloud talent management reduces the risk of human error while processing data. It promotes collaboration within the team and saves time and money. It is also more flexible and easier to update, unlike the dispersed toolkit.
2. Geared up for remote work
The organization must ensure their remote employees working from various locations and time zones have the same learning opportunities. The latest HR technologies have a variety of products that improve remote work.
3. Increased focus on data security
Increased reliance on cloud technologies will need increased measures to protect sensitive data. The latest HR technology trends focus on security and push organizations to implement new procedures.
4. Self-service tools for employees
HR professionals are overworked as they are the employees’ go-to for workplace updates and any other information. With these additional responsibilities, some of this data can be made available to the employee via self-service tools.
These tools can increase administrative efficiency and improve transparency. They can provide real-time updates for all employees. It boosts team morale while reducing burnout.
Read more: It’s Time To Transform Your Business For The New Digital Age – Rise With SAP
How Can Fingent Help Adapt Better To The Rising Changes And Prepare HR For The Future?
Fingent top software development company, can not only change the way your organization is built but the way it runs as well. We can help you change work behaviors for the better. Your HR professionals do not have to be overwhelmed by repetitive administrative tasks.
Fingent can help you adapt better to rising changes. We can help you cut through the complexity of HR technology. Fingent’s customized solutions can help you scale up your core business strategies and focus on your most valuable asset – your employees. That is why our Fingent mantra is ‘locate and lock right talent.’
We understand that your workforce is the backbone of your organization. We will use our in-depth expertise, robust data analysis, and customized solutions to help you align your people, performance, and business values. Fingent’s people development platform Skill Lake is specifically designed to “build a holistic learning culture that goes beyond functional skills, speed up onboarding, and facilitate the on-the-job application of learning concepts.”
Check out the most unique people development platform – Skill Lake!
MUSA is another of Fingent’s brilliant solutions to help streamline and optimize HR and Talent Management tasks. Here is a bit about it:
Why was MUSA required?
Fingent realized that the PeopleOps team was overworked with several mundane jobs. That led to the development of AI-powered virtual assistants. This automated FAQs and improved the efficiency of HR teams.
What was the result?
The virtual assistant improved the HR team’s response time by providing instant and accurate responses to common queries. Thus, it relieved the HR team by minimizing their workload helping them to give adequate attention to the most important asset of an organization, their workforce.
Keep Up With Transforming Behaviors
Last year or so has seen the world change rapidly. This change may seem temporary. But here is a word of caution! This will spark a behavior pattern that will permanently transform the future of work. HR professionals must adapt accordingly to meet these changes. Fingent is confident that these and more HR tech trends will empower the transformation of the future of HR and talent management. Call us today and allow us to help shape the future of your HR function.
The “cloud” is a part of an evolution in IT services. IT services took the mainframe and turned it into the cloud. In the beginning, the on-premise IT department was the be-all and end-all. Over time, things have changed. There began a shift in service providers, service levels expectations, and experiences.
Businesses that leverage cloud capabilities uncover new possibilities and alternatives to fulfill the everchanging demands of their business. This is the time for businesses to think beyond cloud migration.
Most businesses see cloud adoption as the culmination of the journey. Instead, they must recognize that the cloud is a future-proofing continuum. A technology that provides flexible access to a collection of dynamic, ever-improving services.
The pandemic has hastened the cloud adoption pace so NOW is the opportunity to build on this momentum and continue transforming at this new pace. Why?
Why Do Businesses Need To Think Beyond Cloud Migration?
Soon, any app or infrastructure that is not based on the cloud will be considered a legacy. Cloud is no longer a mere technological approach for delivering applications. It will serve as a foundation for corporate innovation and a sustainable supply chain.
When organizations employ the cloud as a future operating model, they set up a technological base that will assist them today and into the future. The cloud continuum includes various forms of ownership and location. All these are dynamically enabled by next-generation connectivity like 5G.
Cloud continuum helps businesses visualize a path from on-premises to cloud migration. Businesses can apply the continuum concepts throughout their technology stack. This includes everything from infrastructure to network to apps, and beyond.
Read on to find out how cloud continuum strategy can help your business realize its full potential.
Read more: Cloud Security Best Practices | Why is cloud security important?
How Cloud Continuum Strategy Can Help Businesses Realize Their Potential
The cloud continuum is made up of several technologies. Setting clear priorities will support all elements of the business and this will help all in your organization to move together towards your business objectives.
- Achieve best possible results: The cloud continuum strategy enables companies to collect incremental feedback. Such feedback will help businesses adjust their aims to obtain the best possible results. This way they can constantly align their objectives.
- A catalyst to accelerate innovation: The cloud continuum is a readymade strategy. It helps organizations improve decision-making and capitalize on new possibilities to disrupt and distinguish through accelerated innovation. It is a new-age innovation accelerator essential for increased agility and future-ready business advantage.
- Elevate customer experience: Businesses can elevate customer experience to the next level with the cloud continuum.
- Enhanced skill and talent: The cloud continuum strategy will contribute to an efficient and effective work environment. It addresses gaps and continuously adapts to change as a continuum best practice.
- Manage scale awareness: The cloud continuum addresses the challenges an organization faces with regard to computing, performance, and latency limits.
- Improves ecosystem network effect: Improvement of network ecosystem depends on the number of ecosystem personnel and their engagement. The more value drivers you have, the better is quantity and quality of the participants.
Read more: Improve Business Planning with SAP Analytics Cloud!
Keys To Unlocking The Potential Of The Cloud Continuum
Holistic and human-centric cloud continuum strategy depends on speed and change. You need agile techniques that can capitalize on continuous enhancements. Here are four keys that will help you unlock the potential of the cloud continuum:
1. Have a clear vision of your goal
Your cloud continuum strategy must address:
Vision: Establish future goals for a resilient and sustainable business. Also, devise a strategy for technical debt reduction.
Competitive landscape: Every organization has weaknesses and vulnerabilities that a competition seeks to take advantage of. Hence, identify any gaps in the supply chain and competitive ecosystem.
Skills and talents continuum: To achieve your business goals in the future, you need to locate and retain relevant skills and expertise today. The foundation you build today will enable you to define your pathway and help you win the talent war.
2. Establish cloud practices
Be agile and adaptive: Make sure you combine technology adoption with strict discipline. This will allow you to modify your non-technology areas as computational advances. Doing so will help you steer ahead of your competition.
Incorporate mobility into the creation of new processes. This will allow for more flexibility in the future.
3. Deliver extraordinary experiences
Recognize that experience is at the heart of your business: Customer experience and employee experience can be a gamechanger for your business. Hence, ensure to make your investments available and accessible to both your employees and customers.
4. Stick to your cloud continuum strategy
Stay on your business journey by sticking to your strategy: You may face several challenges in helping various departments in your organization to understand and stick to your cloud continuum strategy. However, do not give up on your strategy. Educate and encourage everyone in your organization to comprehend and comply with the strategy.
Do you still feel unsure? Here are some use cases that will help you see how some major organizations were reinvented on the cloud continuum.
Read more: Cloud Migration Strategy: 7 Steps to Accomplish a Flawless Transition
How Organizations Are Being Reinvented On The Cloud Continuum
3M
During the pandemic, 3M plants struggled to gather, transfer, and use the data from their production systems. The organization then pushed the data from the plant’s on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Edge. This enabled a faster and more streamlined process. By the end of 2020, 3M was able to double its production of N95 masks.
Sephora
Sephora uses AI and AR to provide extraordinary experiences to all its customers.
Starbucks
Starbucks is well-positioned in the cloud continuum. It continues to innovate and grow despite socio-economic upheavals. It was able to stay ahead of its competition because it collects feedback and adapts its goals continuously.
It also ensures to provide a personalized experience for 100 million weekly customers by creating AI-driven recommendations.
Are You Ready For The Cloud Continuum?
The past year has been a witness to how fast an organization can pivot in the face of a crisis. Now is the golden opportunity to unlock your business potential with the cloud continuum. You too can stay ahead of your pack by becoming a continuum competitor. Partner with Fingent top custom software development company and see for yourself how your business will be transformed to be faster, more agile, and more successful. Let’s get talking!
Undoubtedly, data is what we see almost everywhere, and it is enormous. And it doesn’t stop there, it is growing continuously at a level beyond imagination! Let’s have a look at how it has changed over the years.
A look into how Data and AI transformed in years!
In the 1950s, when there were fewer technological developments, companies would collect the data(offline) and analyze it manually. This was also backed by limited data sources that made it time-consuming in obtaining the results.
The mid-2000s paved the way for changing the world for the better and it was during this time the term “big data” was coined. Almost every business that had something to do with digital infrastructure started looking for ways to use the large data and come up with meaningful insights.
This era also saw the invention of tools like Data mining, OLAP, etc., taking technological advancements to the next level. In general, the internet gained immense popularity not only for organizations but also for households. During this time, technology became more advanced and provided automated options for managing data, and data analysts could analyze data, trends, etc., and provide better recommendations.
Google, Amazon, Paypal, and others also made a mark causing the volume of data to reach newer heights. However, all this posed a storage and processing problem.
The late 2000s to early 2010s saw a surge in Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, and connected devices. The companies used improved search algorithms, recommendations, and suggestions driven by the analytics rooted in the data to attract their customers. Enterprises also realized that would have to deal with unstructured data and so they got familiar with databases such as NoSQL. New Technologies were introduced for faster data processing and machine learning models were used for advanced analytics.
Now, businesses are a step ahead and using automated tools using cloud and big data technologies. With cloud platforms, it is now easier to enable massive streaming and complex analytics.
Read more: 5 ways in which big data can add value to your custom software development
Having seen how data has evolved over the years, let’s have a look at how Artificial Intelligence has transformed in the last generation.
In 1950, a British mathematician and WWII code-breaker- Alan Turing was one of the first people to come up with the idea of machines that could think. To date, the Turing Test is used as a benchmark to determine a machine’s ability to think like a human. While this notion was ridiculed at the time, the term artificial intelligence gained popularity in the mid-1950s, after Turing’s death.
Later, Marvin Minsky, an American cognitive scientist picked up the AI torch and co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory in 1959. He was one of the leading thinkers in the AI field through the 1960s and 1970s. It was the rise of personal computers in the 1980s that sparked interest in machines that think.
That said, it took several decades for people to recognize the true power of AI. Today, Investors and physicists like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are continuing the conversation about the potential for AI technology in combination with big data could have and how it could change human history.
AI technology’s promising feature is its ability to continually learn from the data it collects. The more the data it collects and analyses through specially designed algorithms, the better the machine becomes at making predictions.
Impact on business
AI and big data have an impact on businesses like never before. Whether it is workflow management tools, trend predictions, or even advertising, AI has changed the way we do business. Recently, a Japanese venture capital firm became the first company ever to nominate an AI board member for its ability to predict market trends faster than humans.
On the other hand, data has been the primary driver for AI advancements. Machine learning technologies can collect and organize a large amount of data to make predictions and insights that otherwise cannot be achieved with manual processing. This not only increases organizational efficiency but reduces the chances of any critical mistake. AI can detect spam filtering or payment fraud and alert you in real-time about malicious activities.
AI machines can be trained to handle incoming customer support calls thereby reducing costs. Additionally, you can use these machines to optimize the sales funnel by scanning the database and searching the Web for prospects that have similar buying patterns as your current customers.
Read more: The Future of Artificial Intelligence – A Game Changer for Industries
5 trends in data and artificial intelligence that can help data leaders.
1. Customer experience will be the key
Supply chain and operating costs will mean nothing if you are unable to hold on to your customers. Today, businesses have to be more connected with their customers to be on top of the game. From in-person and digital sales to call centers, companies will have to collect data to have a holistic view of the customer. Businesses must consider other forms of interaction such as using voice analytics to understand how customers interact with call centers or chatbots.
2. Leveraging External data
External data can provide early warning signs about what’s going on. To make external data work, companies must start with a business problem and then think about the possible data that could be used to solve it. That said, companies might need to modernize data flows to leverage external data.
While many businesses have started leveraging external data, some companies haven’t leveraged it yet as they are either too focused on internal data or finding it difficult to transfer data.
A prime example of brands that used external data is Hershey’s Chocolates. It leveraged external data to predict an increase in the number of people using chocolate bars for Backyard S’mores and a decline in sales for smaller candy bars for trick-or-treating.
3. CDOs leading the way towards a data-driven culture
Introducing any new technology without training your employees to adapt and figure out new skills and processes will not be effective. According to Cindi Howson, chief data strategy officer at analytics platform provider ThoughtSpot, Chief Data Officers (CDOs) need to take the lead and empower their employees and the organization to gain time and efficiency with data. Also, CDOs will have to make sure to upskill employees to take full advantage of new technology.
4. Multi-Modal learning
With advances in technology, AI can support multiple modalities such as text, vision, speech, and IoT sensor data. All this is helping developers find innovative ways to combine modalities to improve common tasks such as document understanding.
For example, the data collected and processed by healthcare systems can include visual lab results, genetic sequencing reports, clinical trial forms, and other scanned documents. This presentation, if done right, can help doctors identify what they are looking at. AI algorithms that leverage multi-modal techniques (machine vision and optical character recognition) could augment the presentation of results and help improve medical diagnosis.
5. AI-enabled employee experience
Business leaders are starting to address concerns about the ability of AI to dehumanize jobs. This is driving interest in using AI to improve the employee experience.
AI could be useful in departments such as sales and customer care teams that are struggling to hire people. Along with robotic process automation, AI could help automate mundane tasks to free up the sales team for having a better conversation with customers. Additionally, it could be used to enhance employee training.
Read more: 9 Examples of Artificial Intelligence Transforming Business Today
Conclusion
Leveraging data and Artificial intelligence has grown due to the pandemic and businesses are digitally connected than before the lockdown.
At Fingent, we equip business leaders with insights, advice, and tools to achieve their business goals and build a future-proof organization. To learn more about how we fuel decision-makers to build successful organizations of tomorrow, contact us.
Everyone in the manufacturing world faces the fear of going bust if they do not adopt digital transformation. That is a given and yet we can all agree that digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight.
Currently, enterprises encounter several challenges on their digital transformation journey. One among them is to learn to create and use data through a product life cycle that creates flexible manufacturing processes. Such processes can respond instantly to changes in demand at a low cost to the firm without damage to the environment.
Are you a manufacturer with global aspirations? Do you need to accelerate lead times and product customization? If so, then you may encounter these common business challenges:
- Need for critical infrastructure in remote locations.
- Need for tailored and full-custom design with high quality and ruggedness that fit your specific requirements.
- Need for a simplified supply chain that enables you to get to market quicker and realize faster time to revenue.
- Need to maximize efficiency in the supply chain and ultimately reduce lead time.
- Need to ensure product longevity by providing the same time-zone technical support. And to provide personal support services with the ability to decrease lead times.
Technologies such as 5G, edge computing, and cloud have been pushed further into the limelight especially over the past year, in the wake of the pandemic. As enterprises react to the changing world, these technologies are now emerging at the forefront as a necessary component of network infrastructure.
Read more: Take a Look at How 5G is Reinventing the Way We Work
How Do 5G, Cloud, And Edge Computing Unlock Enterprise Opportunities?
5G, cloud, and edge computing have become major areas of interest and investment at the enterprise level. They provide real-time insights, analytics, and business benefits that can be used once mission-critical latency issues are resolved.
5G, Edge Compute, and Cloud technologies are an emerging set of solutions. When orchestrated together these can enable a spectrum of benefits that are contingent on industry, maturity, and technology. These are complementary technologies that work together for most use cases.
What unlocks the enterprise opportunities is to marry new and existing technologies to create machinery that is as proactive and predictive as the best workers. Edge computing, cloud, and 5G connectivity can be combined to supercharge real-time decision-making and improve quality assurance throughout the supply line.
How would you like it if you can predict the future? Or if you could see the possible problems and correct them before they happen? 5G, edge computing, and cloud promise to give you that ability! These technologies are in a symbiotic relationship.
Cloud contains unlimited resources. Powered by 5G, AI models can continuously update and adapt to situations within the enterprise. This virtuous feedback loop delivers real-time results. Plus, it delivers ongoing improvements over time, as the entire system across the enterprise learns and improves from prior experiences.
This can greatly improve the productivity of your employees. Also, it can save costs tremendously as it can reduce downtime. Here are some specific ways in which 5G, edge computing, and the cloud can benefit the industry.
Read more: How 5G Will Boost Enterprise Investment In Cloud
Cloud For Responsive Resilience
In the past when enterprises needed to deploy applications using their equipment, they had to ensure that their server, memory, and processing power were equipped to run the application efficiently. Any misjudgment could have a cascading effect throughout the enterprise. However, the cloud provides infinite opportunities.
What enterprise opportunities does this provide? It provides what all enterprises need more than ever: increased speed, resilience, and flexibility.
Bringing cloud intelligence to their IT networks can be very beneficial in performing preventive maintenance, making decisions in real-time, and keeping data more secure. It allows for automated decision-making while saving bandwidth costs.
By leveraging cloud capabilities, enterprises can reduce overall costs. They can benefit from automated one-click deployment and realize higher value from data. This contributes to resilience. Resilience is more important to enterprises that are struggling during major disruptions like the pandemic.
Read more: Why It’s Time to Embrace Cloud and Mobility Trends To Recession-Proof Your Business?
5G Can Help Process Information Across The Enterprise
5G technology enables enterprise connectivity, remains powerful, and is constantly updated. 5G enables all the machines and modules to function at the same speed, reliability, and security as we expect from our phones. In other words, it prevents loss of time due to hanging or buffering associated with the mobile networks.
5G will deliver multiple benefits to those who adopt it:
- Provides ultra-reliability and security. It is far more efficient than any wireless mechanism.
- Since 5G eliminates the need for wired connectivity, it enables a high-speed environment with higher flexibility and lower latency.
- Provides the ability to handle mass customization and personalization.
- 5G augments IoT capacity to support device density and data volume
- Improves productivity as it reduces failure rates.
Read more: Top Business Drivers that Boost Legacy Cloud Migration
Edge Computing Can Help Deploy Technology With Unhindered Network Performance
Edge computing can reduce pressure on data centers and service provider networks. Plus, it preserves bandwidth and brings real-time processing close to users and their devices. Here are specific ways in which edge computing can prove advantageous:
- Maintain competitive edge: Edge computing can provide the ability to use data from various machines, processes, and systems to adapt the manufacturing processes in real-time. It can support precision monitoring of the production line. This enables swift operational responsiveness to unforeseen events. Additionally, it can gather data from connected systems and devices in real-time. Hence, manufactures can now analyze data at the point of creation leading to faster and more informed decision-making within the enterprise.
- Helps seize the opportunities that data and performance-intensive technologies present: Edge computing can empower employees and streamline workflows. It can enable smarter supply chains and improve employee safety and productivity.
- Documents at fingertips: Edge computing can provide workers easy access to documents, new workflow instructions, real-time videos and images, and new product updates. This can increase greater efficiency despite social distancing protocols in the current scenario.
Gain a Competitive Edge with Next-Gen Technologies
With IoT deployment on the rise, enterprises are increasingly adopting 5G, cloud, and edge computing. These technologies provide a competitive advantage by reducing unexpected downtime issues. Hence, the enterprises enjoy improved overall efficiency.
The convergence of these technologies can increase agility and resilience. These technologies can be leveraged to establish enhanced productivity, customer satisfaction, and increased ROI. Hence, 5G, cloud, and edge computing technologies must form an important part of any post-pandemic strategies. You must be eager to get started on gaining that competitive edge. Let’s get talking and make that happen!