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Why Cyber Security is Important for Business in Current Times ?

COLD WAR MAY BE OVER. WELCOME TO CODE WAR.

The world is getting more and more reliant on the internet and technology for almost every human need that is the reason this Question Why Cyber Security is Important for Business can not be ignored.

Although life is getting easier and connected with the internet, it is also opening doors for the massive cyber threat.

People are more likely to experience fraud, identity theft, malicious attacks, and other threatening behavior due to the growing connectivity of data on the internet.

Cybersecurity plays a vital role in securing the world’s data and protecting it from hackers, fraud agents, and cybercriminals to prevent such global damage.

By utilizing cybersecurity, governments and organizations can prevent themselves from data breach campaigns.

As the cybersecurity risk is at an all-time high right now due to the usage of cloud-based services to store sensitive and personal data.

The poor structure of cloud services leads to the growing cyber-attacks by sophisticated online attackers to steal organization’s data.

The outdated antivirus software and simple firewalls are no longer responsible for protecting your data, leaving business leaders with no other choice than to reach out to cybersecurity professionals.

Almost every business on the planet is affected by cybercrime of many kinds which results in irreversible damage to the companies.

To spread awareness and prepare your organization against the growing cybersecurity risk, you must educate the staff about “phishing”, ransomware attacks, and other malware designed to steal people’s personal data.

Here’s more about Why Cyber Security is Important for Business and How cybersecurity to help you prevent any data risk –

 

  1. What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is the practice of securing computer systems, networks, devices, and programs from any malicious or cyber-attacks.

Since the entire world is now getting connected (phone, laptops, smart lights, smart air-conditioners, Smart TV, medical devices, smart cars, aero-plane, …), cyber attackers use these instances to extract sensitive data like credit card numbers, social security numbers, and bank account details.

Their increasingly advanced and dangerous new ways to invade sensitive data are backed by social engineering and artificial intelligence.

In 2019, cybercrimes cost the world about $2 trillion, and by 2021, more than $6 trillion damage is estimated by Cybersecurity Ventures.

Thus, prompting the world to immediately invest $10 billion in cyber-security measures by 2027 to secure data against the data-risks.

Cybercrimes aren’t just limited to big corporations and governments, the average consumer is also likely to experience various cyber attacks in the form of phishing, ransomware attacks, identity theft, and financial loss.

The advent of new technology increases the risk of everyday individuals.

 

Fun (Or Not) Fact: It takes less than five minutes to hack an internet-connected device including your smartphone, smartwatch, home control systems, television, and many others.

 

 

  1. Types of Cybersecurity Threats

The importance of cybersecurity can be greatly expressed by introducing the threats that are happening to people every day.

Here are some of the ways hacker infiltrates your systems and attack or steal your personal data –

  • Malware: This type of attack comprises spyware, ransomware, worms, and viruses.
  • They bait people by sending suspicious email links or by downloading risky applications.
  • Once people are inside a network, the attackers steal sensitive information and go on to damage even more.
  • Denial-of-service (DoS) Attacks: This type of attack includes bombarding the network with a request to exhaust bandwidth.
  • In most cases, DoS attacks are meant to be more of an inconvenience than anything else.
  • Man-in-the-Middle Attack: This type of attack happens when hackers interrupt a two-party communication/transaction.
  • They insert themselves through public Wi-Fi and steal their information without ever getting caught.
  • Phishing: As the name suggests, criminals bait innocent people by sending out malicious emails or texts, pretending to be from reputable and well-known sources.
  • By getting people to click harmful links, they steal the victim’s data by invading their personal information.
  • Once the individual clicks the risky link, hackers get access to sensitive data such as credit card, bank account details, login information, and social security.
  • Confidentiality: This relates to information disclosure. For example, if some other person reads all your e-mails & can hear all your communications.

 

  • Integrity: This relates to tampering of data. For example, some other person can modify the mail & other communication before it reaches you. Also, you don’t know that someone has modified the data.
  • Authentication: This relates to spoofing. Another person logs into a website by successfully guessing the credentials.
  • Authorization: When privileges are compromised. So, some other person can enter a building or a computer room, even though he doesn’t have permission.
  • Non-Repudiation: If someone performs some activity (say the transfer of fund from an account to his account) and later denies that.
  1. Why is Cybercrime Increasing?

Cybercrime is generating large lumps of money by exploiting people and since the world is incredibly reliant on the internet, it’s easy to trap people.

Mostly influenced by the growing exposure of personal data on the web via cloud services, public Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.

But the intention isn’t limited to the open exposure. Identity theft isn’t the only goal of cyber hackers, many cyber-attacks aim to comprise data validity to cause distrust in an organization or the government.

Cyber attackers are getting more advanced and sophisticated in stealing and targeting people.

Their new ways of attacking organizations and security systems are incredibly smart.

Crimes like social engineering, ransomware, phishing, and spyware are some of the most common cyber attacks happening with people every day.

The ongoing data breached focus on obtaining financial information such as credit card numbers, bank account details, intellectual property, or trade secrets.

Other forms of data breaches include unintentional information disclosure, information leakage, data spill, or cloud leakage.

 

Another factor that is causing cybercrime growth is the shared nature of the internet. The growing use of mobile devices, the internet of things, and more opportunity to profit off from the dark web. 

Another important Aspect in identifying Why Cyber Security is Important for Business is

  1. How to Protect or Indorse Cybersecurity in Your Organization?

You can ensure various cybersecurity measures within your organization to strengthen data security and reduce the risk of any cybercrime. Here are some of the three best ways to protect your organization –

  1. Educating the Staff – Teaching your organization at every level about the risk of social engineering and other common scams like phishing emails, typosquatting and others to stay alert if ever happened to them.
  2. Invest in Cybersecurity technology infrastructure – Leveraging secure tools that limit information exploitation, monitor any possible cyber risk, and constantly scan for any kinds of data exposure and leakage credentials.
  3. Vendor Risk Management Questionnaire – Using technology to send out vendor assessment questionnaires to help identify potential weaknesses among the third-party vendors and partners that can cause data break, data leak, or other types of cyber risk.

The risk and outcomes of cybercrimes are apparent so there’s no reason to question the need for cybersecurity within organizations. Comply with the above cybersecurity measures to protect your company from any cyber-attack and strengthen your data security today.

Hope you got a better understanding of “Why Cyber Security is Important for Business”

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What does Digital Transformation for Business Actually Means ?

This is really a very Important Question which everyone is asking is as to What does digital transformation for business really means …

The term “Digital transformation” is getting more and more popular among any up-and-coming businesses.

Said to be the next “big” change every business is expected to witness. With the growing buzz, companies across the globe are worried about how to adapt to this new change.

In my honest opinion, digital transformation is real, effective and critical for every business in the coming years.

Like it or not, we have to make a piece with it. If you still haven’t understood what truly defines digital transformation, we’ve got you covered.

Before we dig deep into the definition of digital transformation, we like to say that digital transformation can mean many different things to different businesses.

It is because every business is unique from one another. Digital transformation can mean different solutions or concepts to businesses to be future-proof for success.

What is the meaning of Digital Transformation?

In simple terms, digital transformation is the new change of using technology to innovate and create different ways to do business to drive growth, revenue and enhance customer experience.

According to the experts like Brain Solis, a renowned digital anthropologist and futurist, “(…) the realignment of, or new investment in, technology, business models, and processes to drive new value for customers and employees.”

He says that the realignment is to help businesses compete better in the ever-changing digital economy.

At the core, digital transformation is about adapting to new, futurist and innovative concepts and ideas to bring in value for customers and employees, rather than enhancing or improving the traditional methods.

Nowadays, businesses find most of their targeted customer online than offline or at the store. So in the coming years, customers with a very short attention span and millions of brands option will make new or old businesses struggle. Digital transformation is all about preparing businesses to adapt to the recent digital changes.

In my opinion, we do business transformation to provide a Digital experience to the customer. 

The major change has happened in terms of ‘What and How’ of doing business. Our ‘What’ part has remained the same, like, watching movies, reading books, ordering groceries but, the ‘HOW part has changed. Now we watch movies on Netflix, read books on Kindle, order through Amazon.

So now FAAAN (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Netflix) are providing us true digital experience, that is you are able to consume these services (watching movie..) at any time, any place, anywhere. Also, they provide totally personalized experience.

I call this as ‘Digital Experience’

Digital transformation consists of four aspects:

  1. Understanding the true meaning of digital experience & applying it in your context.
  2. Understanding the cultural mindset & ground realities of your organization. Why digital transformation failed at many other companies.

There are WISE problems; you need to solve.

WISE (W – know your WHY, I –   Integration with the ecosystem, S –   Silos in the organization, E –   Environment & Cultural aspect)

  1. Understanding new technologies & using them properly to transform the business process around us. Technology is an enabler only. Don’t run behind each shiny object. You need to properly understand, which technology to use and why?

According to me, you need to apply ACID (A – Artificial Intelligence, C – Cloud, I – Internet of things, D – Data) formula.

  1. Understanding Digital Anthropology, to change your mindset & subconscious mind. First, we see what we like, later we start liking whatever is shown to us.

To future-proof digital transformation, we need to understand our subconscious mind & digital anthropology plays a key role here.

To conclude, digital transformation focuses on innovative new ways to improve businesses & provide personalized value to each customer, by using digital technology.

The Growing Spending on Digital Transformation

According to IDC Worldwide Semiannual Digital Transformation Guide, the worldwide spending on digital transformation is said to reach $2.3 trillion in 2023.

According to Eileen Smith, program vice president with IDC’s Customer Insights and Analysis Group, “Worldwide DT technology investment will total more than $7.4 trillion over the next four hours.”

Shawn Fitzerald, research director, IDC’s Worldwide Digital Transformation Strategies, says, “The shift toward capital funding is an important one as business executives come to recognize digital transformation as a long-term investment.”

While Statistic states that from 2020 to 2024, the total investments into digital transformation is estimated to reach $7.8 trillion.

Benefits of Digital Transformation

The advantages of digital transformation are many. Here are some of the significant points –

Improving Customer Experience

As stated earlier, the core of digital transformation is to improve customer experience. The significant importance of customer engagement with a company product or service is not worth neglecting at these times. More and more companies realize its gravity, with 92% of company leaders creating sophisticated digital transformation strategies to transform the customer experience.

Hyper personalization is key here.

digital transformation for business

 

More Agility and Innovation

Digital Transformation has the potential to reshape the market faster with improved agility and innovation than any other. Digital businesses employ agility to innovate rapidly to the market change and use their innovation to gain market share and scale faster than their competitors.

Accurate and Data-based Insights

By studying the customer purchase pattern and history, business not only gains the advantage to determine the next product to add to inventory and what to remove but also recreate business strategies. Companies can track metrics and analyses the data collected during the digital marketing efforts and tailor it to make the next product. The data-driven insights help with better decision-making and creating new ways to drive higher ROI.

Room For Collaboration Across All Departments

Teamwork is the keyword for running a successful business. When the entire team of people collaborate and improve the work for your customers, the outcome will truly earn success. In times like COVD-19, collaboration is a much-needed asset any business can leverage. DT is all about using technology to bring people from different departments and work together to create something greater. Without running in a separate direction, the team can make a major plan to draw in more customers and benefit the customers.

What are the Leading Drivers and Examples of Digital Transformation?

The leading drivers of digital transformation are Uber, Ola, Burberry, Net-A-Porter, Airbnb, LiquidSpace, Trivago, and many more. Uber’s entry into the transportation industry made other car rentals and taxi companies adopt similar initiatives like ride-sharing and on-demand service, including bikes and scooters.

What digital transformation is doing is to transition from the outdated processes and use technology to offer better service. The growing need for current businesses to adopt agile principles and improve efficiency with technology is felt significantly.

Here are some of the best examples you can take inspiration from –

TGI Fridays and IHOP – These restaurants are experimenting with virtual assistants to help customers with mobile ordering.

Porsche – The German automobile manufacturer improved customer experience by understanding more about their drivers.

Porsche major strategy was to place all customer data into a central CRM data centre and document every customer interaction.

The data-driven insights help with segmentation and predictive intelligence.

The result of the experiments was brilliant to generate an increase in overall sales conversation rate as the Porsche only contacted the customers who were interested in purchasing a car.

 

Anthem – The insurance company reinvented healthcare with digital transformation after Anil Bhatt, the vice president and head of digital solutions at Anthem.

He employed deep digital transformation into the financial, HR, and other departments to build agile structure, hire the best talent, and establish the right leadership to increase output.

Audi – The company shifted from traditional showrooms to virtual showrooms with multi-touch tables, tablet-user interfaces and power walls. The result, as expected, was phenomenal. At Audi City London, the immersive experience causes a 60% sales increase.

Daimer – The US leading steam cleaner company brought more than 1 million customers with their innovative digital transformation.

There’s more to digital transformation than we can imagine. In the coming years, companies willing to adopt and transform digitally will experience better advantages and revenue than the ones still stuck with outdated ways of doing business.

What are your thoughts on digital transformation for your company?

Are you confused between Agility & CI-CD?

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Agility and CI-CD are often some of the most common terms used in software development and testing circles.

If you are confused between both of these terms, then we must start understanding what each term means –

Lets understand – Agility :

The term, agile refers to the set of frameworks and practices that follow the official principles of “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development”, containing 4 values and 12 principles.

It is a document with key values and principles that help the development team work efficiently and sustainably.

It signifies iterative and incremental methods such as Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Kanban, Lean Development and Extreme Programming (XP).

More than anything, Agility focuses on predictability.

As you are doing the demo of product, after completing of each feature, you are able to get immediate feedback and you can incorporate those feedback/change management, at regular intervals.  

This is achieved through dynamic collaboration, iterative feedback cycles and cross-functional teams that work on processes and tools designed for specific tasks.

In agile development, the priority is set on collaborations and self-organization.

Here, the team creates a solution in a team and work cross-functional.

It means that there is an indisputable division between the teams. From the testers to developers, everyone is equally involved from the beginning of the process.

Also, as each process hasten, people’s feedback is taken into account.

Agile testing is perfect in cases where both business and technical demands change as the project advances.

Since this is true with many digital projects, agile works the best in the development approaches.

So Agile is best suited for an environment, where requirements are not fully clear, team members need to learn new skills & customer is ready to experiment with you.

Remember, finally, it’s a win-win for both vendor & customer as, overall rework ( Testing, fixing, ..) cost comes down.    

In conclusion, contrary to the traditional methods when companies used to manufacture cars, they used to prepare the blueprint.

They used to detail out, for a car, which/how various parts will be added and how the assembly line will look like.

Once you know, how to successfully manufacture one car, you can just replicate and produce millions of those cars, with a very low defect rate. But this is not true for the knowledge industry & software.

You don’t write software for one bank & get money for replication of the same code.

Here every time, you are producing a new car, there’s a new approach involved in each step.

Earlier, in a waterfall model, one used to gather requirements & prepare a design. But this was different from the blueprint.

No one was able to correctly envisage, how the final software will look & work.

So, after putting effort for 6-8 months, both customer and vendors would end up disputing with each other as the end product is not what the customer expected (though it matches the requirement document).

Hence there was a need felt, to show the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) at regular intervals to customers and incorporate changes.

Agility is all about the ability to handle and incorporate change management.

CI-CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) is the way to show/deliver these changes to the customer.

But after showing it to the customer, if you are not able to incorporate the change, the whole purpose of agility is lost.

CI/CD :

CI/CD comprises the practices for software engineering and deployment. It refers to the engineering practices where members of the development team integrate their code at the highest frequency i.e. daily and even hourly.

Earlier, integration has always been a time and effort-consuming work, but CI tactics utilize automation tools that execute build and testing.

The focus of CI is to establish a software-defined lifecycle the reduce the effort for building and integration.

And with CI use, the frequent integration resulting in detecting errors in the code quite early, causing no room for any defect.

While CD or Continuous Delivery refers to the practice that ensures the code remain in a deployable state.

Meaning that all the new features, bug fixes, experiments, configuration changes incorporated into the code always remain ready for deployment to a production environment.

The focus of CD is to make deployments routine events to take place at any minute on demand.

Whether that development occurs to a large-scale distributed system or embedded system or complex prod environment.

CD also refers to Continuous Deployment, a practice where all changes are automatically deployed into production.

Contrary to Continuous Delivery, there’s no final manual approval step before realizing it into production.

To execute any of these practices, it’s vital to have the right CI/CD tools at pace.

What is Big Data and Why it is so Important?

There is a lot of buzz around What is Big Data, but there is also a lot of confusion as to why it is so important.

How big is big data –  First Lets Understand it

Big Data is a combination of structured and unstructured data collected by organizations to extract information. It’s later used for machine learning, predictive modeling, and other analytics applications.

Big data is growing out to be significantly crucial for companies as they utilize it to modify their operations, resulting in better customer service, personalized marketing campaigns by checking on specific customer preferences, and ultimately increasing sales.

An organization using big data has the upper hand over businesses that haven’t yet.

Big data increases the competitive advantage by letting the company know more about their customer and making better decisions.

In an era of massive marketing, setting your target right can garner big customers.

If you aren’t familiar with your customers, there’s no point in spending millions on marketing and customer engagement.

However, companies gain valuable insights into their customer preference, choices, and purchase habits that result in improved customer engagement and conversion rates through big data use.

Apart from retailers, big data use has also helped medical researchers to identify disease risk factors and diagnose illnesses.

It is becoming more and more critical for keeping people healthy.

Data from Electronic health records (EHRs), web, social media and other areas illustrate updated insights on infections, disease threats or outbreaks of a person to the healthcare provider or the government agencies.

Apart from healthcare, big data also helps determine potential drilling locations and regular pipeline operations for the energy industry.

The Breakdown

Big data comprises a wide range of data types, including structured data in databases and data warehouses based on Structured Query Language (SQL), unstructured data, such as text and documents filed stored in Hadoop clusters or NoSQL database systems.

All different ranges of data types can be stored together in a data lake.

It is based on a cloud object storage service or Hadoop.

Big data applications comprise numerous data sources that might not be integrated.

Data analytics is taken from all different places to project a product’s potential success and conversion rates by correlating past sales data, online buyer review or return data.

The question is at what velocity can the big data be generated, processed and analyzed?

In most cases, big data sets are updated daily, weekly or every month in traditional data warehouses.

Big data applications take the incoming data, correlate and analyze it to form an answer/result based on the overarching query.

Data scientists and analysts process a detailed understanding of the present data and find their answers from it that’s valid and up to date.

Big data can be described by the following characteristics:

  • Volume
  • Variety
  • Velocity
  • Variability

Storage and Processing of Big Data

The amount of big data handling is a unique challenge on the underlying compute infrastructure.

The computing power necessary to process high volumes and types of data isn’t possible with a single server or server cluster.

To acquire the velocity required to achieve big data tasks, businesses require adequate processing capacity, which asks for hundreds or thousands of servers to process work and operate together in clustered architecture with technology like Apache Spark and Hadoop.

Attaining the required velocity at an affordable range is also a big challenge.

It’s challenging to invest in an extensive server and storage infrastructure that supports big data workloads, especially those that don’t run 24/7.

Hence, public cloud computing is used for hosting big data systems.

Public cloud computing stores petabytes of data and scales up the required servers long enough to complete a big data analytics project.

With the public cloud, the business only has to pay for the storage and compute time and can turn it off whenever needed.

To enhance service levels, even more, the public cloud offers big data capability via managed service, including Amazon EMR, Microsoft Azure HD Insight, and Google Cloud Dataproc.

In cloud environments, big data is stored in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), lower-cost cloud storage (S3), relational databases and NoSQL databases.

The organization that needs to deploy on-premises big data systems use Apache open source technologies in addition to Hadoop and Spark.

More include YARN, MapReduce, Kafka, HBase and SQL-on-Hadoop.

what is big data
what is big data

 

Challenges of Big DATA

Apart from the processing capacity and cost problems, designing significant data architecture is also a big challenge for the users.

Big data systems need to be designed according to the particular needs of the businesses.

Despite designing, deploying and managing extensive data systems also needs new skills from database administrators (DBAs) and developers focused on relational software.

Although all these issues can be resolved using a managed cloud service, IT managers need to be attentive about cloud usage to ensure the charges don’t exceed the limit.

Shifting on-premises data sets and processing workloads to the cloud is also a complex process for many businesses.

To make the data in big data systems accessible to data scientists and analysts is also tricky, especially in distributed environments that comprise different platforms and data stores.

To make relevant data accessible for analytics, IT and analytics work hard to build data catalogs that use metadata management and data lineage functions.

Also, data governance and data quality are a priority to ensure that big data sets remain clean, consistent, and used rightly.
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How does Digital Transformation Improves the Four Main Industry ?

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An insider secrets of How Digital Transformation (DT) helps in bringing a personalized experience in Four Key Areas…

All different areas which need attention and effort are transformed digitally. 

Around 15% of the world population or around 1 billion persons need special help.

Even before COVID, you were not able to see these persons on-road as many of them are confined to their homes. 

Digital Transformation can help people to live a normal life.

The special need can be in terms of term mobility, speech, or hearing impairment.

  1. How Digital Transformation Enhances the Lives of Special Needs?

It is estimated that about 36 million people in the world are visually impaired, while 216 million live with moderate to severe visual impairments.

The World Health Organization calculates that about 80% of vision impairment can be avoidable if treated early.

If people have better access to treatment, then the count for blindness or low vision among the global population can be diminished.

Technology has been playing a prominent role in breaking down those barriers and via, Artificial Intelligence, these problems have been improving significantly.

Mobile is helping our visually impaired finds by using voice on mobile to get answers for many things.

For instance, Microsoft’s Seeing AI, an app that’s designed to help people with low vision or blindness.

The app enhances the surrounding around the user with rich audio descriptions.

It can read a handwritten note or scan a barcode and let the user know about the product.

If you point the camera at something, the app will describe the people it can see and where they are in the image- center, top left, and so on. 

On similar lines, the mobile app can help friends, who can’t speak. You type on mobile and it will announce to the crowd in a loud way, in any language.

Now can also have eyeglasses/specs for friends, who can’t hear.

They can wear these glasses and that glass can interpret the lip signs of other persons and put those lines on his glasses or show in one app on his mobile, which he can read.

We have access to chips installed on all wheelchairs and that data can be collected to find out, which places, buildings are wheelchair friendly.

This can be made available in the public domain.

This may help/incentivize various commercial building owner to make their building, compliant with those needs.

  1. Digital Transformation to Improve Healthcare

DT enhances care for the elder population advice for the young population.

Today, for many of us, we don’t have any medical/gene records of our great grandfathers.

Now think of scenarios in the future, where medical data for your full family history is maintained.

Based on that, from a young age itself, personalized advice can be given to young family members.

Also, as of today, also, personalized care can be provided to the elder population.

Personalized care is the priority for many healthcare providers and due to DT, it is possible to offer to patients.

Through wearable technology, people no longer have to check in with their doctor every few weeks or months, rather the device lets them know something goes wrong.

Doctors are now focusing on prevention and maintenance, without complicating the patient’s health.

Hospitals have been proactively investing in wearable technology devices that offer up-to-date monitoring of high-risk patients to figure out the possibility of any major health risk.

The most common device includes heart rate sensors, exercise trackers, oximeters, swear meters, and many more.

The use of AI has proven many benefits to the healthcare department, through chatbots and Japanese nurse robots.

The biggest influence of AI can be felt in the areas like precision, medicine, drug discovery, medical imaging, and genomics.

Earlier, cancer patients met with cookie-cutter treatment options with high failure rates.

But with AI’s pattern recognition, now patients have access to personalized therapies that are tailored to their genetic makeup and lifestyle.

In oncology, the AI-powered computer programs analyze thousands of pathology images of different cancers to provide highly accurate diagnosis and predict the best suited anti-cancer drug combination.

In the area of medical imaging diagnostics, AI helps radiologists find details that are not visible to the human eye.

  1. The Need for Digital Transformation in Education

Many of us don’t know our strengths and areas of improvement. Our education teaches as if one size fits all.

Can we provide personalized education, based on areas of strength/liking of a student? Yes, we sure can.

Access to personalized learning approaches has been the biggest reason for the digital transformation in education.

Rather than trying every student to fit into one single box, schools and programs have started to value offering an adaptable solution for students based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Personalized learning has provided students with a plethora of benefits and understanding their skillsets.

When students get to learn in a way that’s tailored to their own learning approach, it helps them to understand, absorb and retain critical information.

Personalized education actually helps them build interest in studying and strive forward in pursuing education.

Students value their time while studying and feel encouraged enough to earn degrees and pursue job opportunities in their interesting subjects.

When students partake in studying a particular subject, they also become keen on pursuing it even more.

Schools that have made personalized education accessible manage to improve kids’ retention rate.

This in return, increases the school’s reputation and improves its ability to prepare students for their next big step in education or job training.

In many counties, including India, we have a very peculiar situation. We have many Engineering graduates, but they are jobless.

Irony is that companies are also short of human talents.

They want to hire but many of these Engineering graduates are ‘not having relevant & necessary skills to do the job, as per the requirement.

This is true for almost all other industries. We have ‘fully educated’ young members but they lack the skills to do a job.  

  1. Digital Transformation affects the Environment

DT also impacts farming efficiency. No ‘one size fits all’ solution to all farmers in a state.

Based on the condition of the soil, weather, and the water of your own agricultural land, advice is provided to use a type of seed, pesticide, urea, etc.

The IoT sensors are used to track down the soil moisture, soil carbon, micronutrient levels, change in the microclimate of a field, and the rate of plant growth throughout harvest cycles.

Apart from the soil and harvest state, the device can be used to control and monitor production processes such as irrigation to specific areas in a field at the right time, given the grown and characteristics of the field’s crops. These devices are used almost everywhere in modern farming.

Drones and robotics can also optimize farming operations and reduce labor work.

Conclusion

Insights from ‘Storage of experience’: In the present world, when a person retires from a job/profession, all his experience goes along with him.

This is true for all sectors, especially the service sector.

So once a doctor or driver or bank person retires, all his experience is not stored anywhere.

Think of a scenario, where all data & experience of a person is stored for decades.

New things can be created in the future by gaining insights from this historical data.

In the year 2040, one scientist can investigate the medical, virus, hospital, patient data of 2020 and create new things.

Many more things, like this, are possible.

Let’s create a beautiful future for our coming generation, by adopting Digital Transformation in our work.

 

Advantage of Cloud Computing

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The year 2020 makes cloud one of the strongest players in technology. Cloud computing isn’t just robust, but it’s more critical than ever for our use.

When the pandemic hit, the world massively shifted to using SaaS and cloud-based services. The decision to shift overnight was to connect with people, especially by companies.

Although the importance of adopting cloud was done way before by some companies, the competition has only increased in recent years.

Cloud Computing Jargons

Cloud-first, cloud-native, cloud-ready, and many more other jargons are often used to describe cloud computing. In simpler terms, the cloud works as a fantastic storage centre that’s easily accessible can provide you unlimited hardware, without paying anything upfront. Adopting cloud gets you access to enterprise-class technology, making it possible for many businesses to scale faster than their established competitors. Cloud isn’t just crucial for the IT department; it also affects other parts of the organisation such as Payroll, HR, Customer Relations, Finance, and Creatives. Take Amazon, for instance. Their cloud platforms have been an excellent resource for frameworks, principles, style design and practices.

Here are the 4 mega benefits of Cloud Computing

1. Flexibility in terms of converting CAPEX to OPEX

Contrary to the IT infrastructure, running the cloud is quite reasonable. For the hardware, you need not pay upfront. While running and maintaining your server, you may have to come across unexpected expenses with the system and hardware management. However, with a cloud service provider, every need for your work is fulfilled at an agreed cost with no upfront investment required. Moreover, the cloud provider is in charge of the maintenance while getting everything you need at a reasonable price in real-time.

In case of need (quarter-end, sales and promotion day), you can get more hardware copies, where you can run your application, cloud helps with proper utilisation of the copies. When you work with a cloud-based model, the cloud provider’s server infrastructure is shared between your workload and the computing needs of other clients. So, depending on your workload, the cloud ensures the complete utilisation of hardware sources.

2. Backup, Security and Disaster Recovery…Peace of mind

Unexpected damage is a significant problem for many IT houses. You can’t rely on single hardware to keep things running. There must be backup that’s there in case of any damage from the system crash
or failure.

Buying new hardware will only cause more financial loss along with the destruction of data and work that’s lost. Even if you don’t use hardware, they still require regular maintenance. Which also results in unnecessary money spending. To avoid such detrimental investments, move to the cloud for inexpensive maintenance and data recovery. A cloud service provider relies on several data centres and ensures backup by replicating your data.

Whenever there’s a disaster such as fire, system crash or flood, you won’t experience any problem as the system will bring up another CLOUD copy/node & operations will run automatically
in time.

Must Read: The Amazing Little Perks and Challenges of Internet of Things 

3. Different Models Tailored to your needs so that you can focus on your primary Job

When you are shifting to the cloud, there are three prominent models to choose from. These are IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS. They are simply the three ways which you can use for your business. The IaaS is a cloud-based, pay-as-you-go for services for networking, storage and virtualisation.

The PaaS is a hardware and software tool available over the internet and is currently the most used in all three. At the same time, Saas is software that’s available via a third-party over the internet. All these three models are different, and based on your needs, and you can pick the suitable one.

For IaaS, user pay-as-you-go instead of purchasing the hardware outright. The Iaas infrastructure is scalable depending on the storage and processing requirements. Iaas is the best pick for enterprises who want to cut the cost of buying and maintaining their hardware. Since the data is uploaded on the cloud, IaaS does not carry any chance of failure. It has virtualisation for administrative tasks, resulting in time for other work.

PaaS is the best platform with tools to test, develop and host applications in the same environment. It allows businesses to focus on development without having to stress over the underlying infrastructure.

PaaS providers take care of the security, operating system, backups and server software. It also allows collaborative work when the workforce is running remotely. And lastly, SaaS provides users with software and applications through a subscription plan. With SaaS, users don’t have to manage, install or upgrade the software. It does so on its own. The data stays secure in the cloud, and no hardware failure results in any loss of data.

You can offload all this work by choosing the correct model ( IAAS, PAAS, SAAS..) to the third party. Now you and your team can concentrate on the main work.

4. Efficient, Agile and Going Global

Organisations adapted to the cloud are way ahead of their competitors with outdated architecture, hardware and systems. The pandemic intensified the gap between companies with cloud computing against others who have yet to make the shift. For companies with cloud computing, the outbreak didn’t create much business interruption instead of other companies who lost contracts and
experienced massive loss from their business shut down.

Apart from adapting well to serious global shutdowns, the cloud also helps businesses go international in no time. It allows easy deployment of applications in several different regions of the work in just a few clocks, within reduced latency and better customer experience at a lower cost. And if your vendor tells you that its application is CLOUD ready, ask him, whether it adheres to the 12 Factor App methodology.

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a methodology for building software as a service application. The 12 factors help programmers write modern apps in a declarative way, using clear contracts deployed via the cloud.

Conclusion

These were the four significant reasons why every company needs to shift to the cloud immediately if it still hasn’t already. Organisations with cloud as their leading platforms can now focus on different work like coming up with creative solutions and experience less time in dealing with their data and server access.

Hope you got some insights regarding the advantage of Cloud Computing.

The Amazing Little Perks and Challenges of Internet of Things (IOT)

The Internet of things (IoT) is turning many imagination and fiction work into a reality.

With just a clap, you can switch on your living room’s lights or close the fridge with a button while sitting on a couch.

With the surge of several device usages, now you can connect them and send information across. 

What makes it possible to connect?

The Internet of Things (IoT) 

IoT, in simple words, is connecting things through the Internet. Connecting hardware items, sensors, or devices to the Internet brings efficiency to the user.

The name “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999. Now, IoT is used in almost every industry.

IoT’s prominent applications are cars, voice-activated assistants like Alexa, Siri, health-monitoring devices, security devices, smart meters, fitness and health trackers, road sensors, and many more.

The devices work using sensors by exchanging data to a computer or software, allowing them to perform the required task.

Due to the “smart” utility and increasing automation level, there’s a surge in IoT use among various devices.

It’s been reported that around 127 objects are synced up every second.

Perks of Internet of Things (IoT)

Devices connected to the Internet allow data collection, transmission, and automation.

For instance, devices can collect information, send it to the user, receive information, and act on it. If not, IoT can help with doing both of these things.

Here are some of the substantial benefits of IoT:

  1. Access to More Data, Leading to Better Decision

Due to the built-in sensors, the devices can collect large amounts of data in different areas.

For instance, apart from knowing which food has expired in your smart refrigerator, you can also know additional information like power consumption, average time spent on opening the doors, temperature, and much more.

Not just for the customer, IoT can help companies to analyze a particular device design based on the data for improving features.

IoT allows farmers to understand when’s the right time to water the plants while also informing the soil’s state.

This is possible through an automatic watering system with added sensors put in the soil to measure its moistness and convey other information, helping harmers to act better.

Companies have started to realize this technology’s power, leading to a significant increase in the market.

The market value of IoT is suspected to increase to over $3 trillion annually by 2026.

  1. Efficient Ability to Track and Monitor

Data is the new oil. Tracking the customers’ data helps the company understand its consumers better and create items based on their buying patterns.

People can track the quality of the goods at their home, and by monitoring its state, they know when to replace an item. You can efficiently use the resource by tracking your assets.

Businesses also benefit significantly by active tracking and monitoring, especially in the MRO industry.

The manufacturing industry uses expensive machinery, where single damage can result in high downtime.

By real-time insights and visibility of your assets, IoT helps improve predictive maintenance on critical machinery, ultimately enhancing the production quality.

  1. Effective Resource Utilization and Cost Savings

IoT allows excellent use of assets and results in cost savings.

For instance, whenever you leave your room, the lights will automatically turn off, keeping your electricity bill pretty light.

Connected devices come with various benefits and implementations.

The IoT system helps with machine-to-machine (M2M), Machine to physical Entity (M2E) communication, causing better and more durable efficiency for both the company and user.

So, a physical bridge can tell, traffic status on the bridge, weather condition near the bridge, the health of bridge & whether this requires immediate attention or that can be done later.

Also, all devices will be able to talk with each other and exchange useful information.

In the case of self-driving cars, each car can communicate and suggest which route to take, avoid accidents etc.

In offices, earlier there was always a problem of, improper usage of air-conditioner, lights. On a floor, these devices, used to run, even if no employee is there.

Even at home, there is laziness to switch off fans, once we move between rooms.

Now with IOT, these devices will sense, whether anyone is there in room, floor and switch off accordingly

IoT Still Needs Work : 

With the plethora of perks, IoT is proven to possess severe safety and security vulnerability.

Due to widespread connectivity, almost every device is susceptible to attack or misuse.

A minute attack can bring down the entire system, causing significant loss.

Another major issue with large amounts of data storage can also result in personnel misuse.

If every device stores data it’s collecting, then there’s a chance for someone to access all this data and use it for their means.

Hackers can violate the right to personal privacy.

With IoT, everything will be connected to the Internet, so every bit of information stored in each device is easily accessible to the hacker.

What you keep and eat in your fridge, what’s your heartbeat through your smartwatch, and what’s on your phone can be under anyone’s reach.

The infamous ransomware attack called Wanna Cry affected computers in 150 countries.

People have expressed the detriment of how easy it is to hack and exploit devices nowadays.

Researchers have also illustrated how simple it is to hack cars, power plants, and even voting machines.

Safety violations and security vulnerability are the most significant issues for every individual. And there’s no real solution offered by IoT yet.

Also, as now everything is connected, a virus can bring down, the whole system.

During COVID time, the virus spread to all countries as each country is connected & everyone was traveling and hence, spread the virus.

The same can be true for IOT. A virus, on one device, can infect other connected devices & bring down the whole system.

Although several security methods are released to put an end to such issues, the biggest challenge for IoT is strengthening its security and safety level.

Also, we still don’t have, one standard protocol, by which each device, will talk with others. It’s like a toothbrush. Everyone needs it but no one wants to use the toothbrush of others.

Lack of an agreed common standard will create a lot of siloed clusters in the future.

Presently, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Standards Association lists many standards available and being worked on for several different devices.

Microsoft, too, considered these issues and built up its system – IoT Central. The system allows businesses a central platform to set up their IoT device.

Conclusion

Lastly, by all means, IoT is a revolutionary technology that is capable of significantly impacting people’s lives.

However, being aware of IoT’s challenges and issues can help us only to improve and fix those problems to leverage its advantages without any risk.

What is Digital Anthropology and How to do it ?

As per the definition of Anthropology – It is the scientific study of humanshuman behavior, and their societies in the past and present study patterns of behavior of human society.

Digital Anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology.

  1. How anthropology has helped us in understanding the evolution of the human race

To understand the relevance of anthropology, think of human life before electricity was invented. Our ancestors had a very different lifestyle that time. They used to get up early and finish all the work before sunset.

Before the industrial revolution started, a major human population was involved in the work, where physical power was required ( For Example, agriculture, stone cutting, transportation of goods…). To improve the productivity here, we came up with various tools & machines.

To run these machines, we used various methods. Like, initially, we used steam power. So many plants were built near rivers.

Once electricity came, we started building plants, at faraway places. Our various other habits got changed post electricity. Many industries came up, which revolved around ‘nightlife’.

We could not have imagined a city like Las-Vegas in that era. After electricity came, many other changes happened in our personal and business life. So we can safely conclude that electricity had helped the human race to evolve to the next stage.

Now you can relate to various inventions like the telephone, cars, the airplane…, which had helped the human race to pivot & improve overall productivity, ability to work from faraway places….

  1. Digital and & new habits

My firm belief is that Digital has the same power and this will also help the human race to evolve to the next level. Hence, it is vital for us to deeply understand digital anthropology, if we want to future proof our digital transformation journey.

Let me give some examples here.

Today, many of us have a smart cameras and we have got the habit of taking selfies & immediately posting the same on social media platforms. During 2020 COVID time, we were able to work from home. We were also able to remain at home & were able to watch movies, read books, order groceries.

Now many companies are talking of making ‘ Work from home’ a normal practice, even after COVID. Remember, nothing new got invented during this COVID time. Working from home & watching the movie at home was possible earlier also. But somewhere in our mind, there was a deep-rooted belief that ‘WFH’ for long period can’t happen.

Now that belief has got shattered ( or should I say that mother nature taught us many things during COVID times & taught us what all is possible).

In my opinion, we still have to harness the full power of digital. Again, one of the big reasons is, deep-rooted beliefs in our mind.

I guess same thought was prevalent when cars came. Everyone thought/worried about, what will happen to the horse-cart. In my opinion, only horses lost the job and human-adapted to new conditions/took up driver job etc

So on a similar note, now one topic up for discussion is ‘ what will happen when machines start doing all the work, which is getting done by humans’.

Yes, we have machines, which have a good ‘human-like’ mind. These machines can help us in doing various calculation works. So from initial calculators to the current robots, these machines had helped in doing various ‘calculation’ work faster & error-free.

  1. Digital anthropology & work of future

We need not worry about future of current work. Rather we should start thinking about the work, which will be required in future. Instead of worrying about automation, we need to start thinking about ‘ augmentation with machines’.

As per various research, it is established that the human mind consists of two parts. Conscious Mind & Sub-Conscious Mind. Our conscious mind is good at calculation, remembering various things & doing logical work.

Our sub-conscious mind is good at various soft skills & emotional intelligence.

Remember, machines can have a good ‘human-like conscious mind’. But they will not have a subconscious mind.

Humans, who have good control over their sub-conscious minds, will be successful in future. That will help evolve the human race to the next level.

Let me give some examples here. Based on customer consent, various new era technology companies ( Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix…) are collecting data based on our behavior ( where we traveled, which type of movies we saw, which type of clothes we ordered). Later that data is used to influence our sub-conscious mind. That is, you start seeing recommendations for products, which matches your taste.

First you see what you like, later you start liking, whatever is shown to you.

Many of us, are worried because in our current education system, no one teaches the importance of soft-skills & emotional intelligence. We know, how computer works but don’t know, how our own mind works. In past, our various saints also used to meditate long hours, to understand & control their subconscious mind.

            In coming days

  1. Soft skills and EQ will be better rewarded than certification and IQ
  2. Cognitive flexibility
  3. Judgment and decision-making over routine data scanning abilities
  4. Creativity and critical-thinking skills

So in nutshell, I will say that we should welcome the machines/robots/computers in our life. They will do various repetitive, monotonous work. The human mind will be free to do various creative work, spend good time with our family ( elders & children), take care/console persons who is depressed.

Each human being is different & by that definition, each human being has a different sub-conscious mind. Our current world population around 8 billion. So even 1/8 of this population ( that is 1 billion human beings), collectively harness the power of their subconscious mind ( creativity, compassion, empathy, curiosity, gratitude.), it will do wonders in taking human race to next level.

What are the Important Pillars of Agile ?

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AGILE : Important Pillar

1.   Agile doesn’t mean that you need to do work faster. Agile says that you should be able to respond to ‘changes ( requirement change, schedule change..)’, faster.

I have seen many groups, who are ‘supposedly agile’. They have done the work breakdown, they deliver on a continuous basis. But they are not able to handle any change request. That defeats the purpose of agile.

Remember, Agile came into the limelight once, we moved towards the Software industry. In the manufacturing industry, “Six Sigma” and “Just In Time” were good practices. But in the software industry, the output expected is very different. In the manufacturing industry, you produce a car, a very tangible thing. You can always create a well proto-type of car and a good assembly line will produce, cars at scale.

Now, you have to deliver software code. No physical output here. In the initial era of the software era, we used to work in the waterfall model. That is, we used to take requirements from clients, do design, coding, testing as per our/vendor’s understanding & deliver software code to clients. There used to be a big mismatch between what the client had asked and what got delivered. Many times, lot of rework was required, which used to be painful ( and costly), both for the client as a vendor.

The reason being, it was very hard for the client to fully & clearly explain the requirement & it was equally difficult for a vendor to understand each permutation/combination of requirements.

To resolve that problem, Agile came into the picture.  The main aim of this is that client should see the system ( say banking system), continuously working with new software, and tell what changes should be done. This rework should cost a bomb to neither client nor vendor.

To emphasize again, If you are really agile, you should be able to respond to changes, faster ( and not necessarily work faster).

2.   Understand the difference between Agile team vs agile enterprise.

3.   When the process is King, ideation will take a back seat.

4.   Innovation requires ‘relaxed focused’ mind. This means that when you plan to do something, be clear what you will NOT do.

Structure & Roles

    1. Understand the strength of our team members & bring work to him as per his strength. Don’t just add more team members in a project. ( That is don’t bring person to work but bring work to person)
    2. Define the Agile career path for your team members.
    3. Remember, each company goes through four phases. Entrepreneur, Visionary, Operator & Pragmatic.

First entrepreneurs start the journey. They are risk-takers, can sell & sometimes they ignore the fact that they can fail ( and hence they succeed). After that visionary phase comes. They put the proper framework to scale that idea. In the third phase, Operators come. They make sure that that with the established framework, the output is produced without any issue. The last phase is the pragmatic phase.  By this time, the original idea has either lost its relevance or there are too many companies in the market, who are able to produce output by that idea. This is most important phase & many times, companies get hung on/don’t accept the fact it’s time to shut down. Correct action in this phase is to do the fire-sale , minimize the loss and move to the next idea.

Leadership & Culture

1.      Trusting & empowering team vs Command & Control model

2.      Managers should clearly articulate the ‘Value” added by them

3.      Remove blockers

4.      Continuous feedback loop from real customer

5.      More frequent & flexible planning.

6. It’s easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled.

Un-learning & Learning in Digital world

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Getting ready for the future:

  1. Importance of Learning & un-learning

 One of the most important traits, which is required in today’s world is the ‘Habit of continuous un-learning & learning’. This is very important for all IT industry workers. They are doing software projects, which mainly involves automating the work of other industry. Like, automating, inventory management, banking operations, etc.

So that naturally beg the question that these IT industries workers, should automate their own internal work also.  It means, none of the software engineers, should do work, which he was doing say, six months back. He should have automated that work.

So, what next for this software engineer.

This is where un-learning & learning comes into the picture.

(              (2) Current challenges

I see a big problem in our current system. In almost all our colleges, lot of emphasis is given on learning hard skills ( Math, Science, Commerce….). Though these are important, almost no coaching/mentoring happens on soft-skills.

And it’s very hard ‘To learn how to unlearn’.

I will go to the extent of saying that learning math is easy but learning, how to work in team ( where team members are getting changed ) is very difficult.

That is, you know that 2+2=4. It’s always true. But when you are working in a team, you have to adjust your working style based on other co-workers. If your team is always constant, you are lucky. But many times, it is not true.

Your team members will keep on getting changed. The methods you used in your last team, may not work. You may have to learn new skills & change your style, based on new work & based on new team members.

  1. Skills to focus upon

According to me, these 3 skills are most important. That is ‘Self-awareness’, ‘Learning attitude’ & ‘Pattern finding’.

Self-awareness: Do you really know, yourself?

So If I take my example, I will say that I ( Raktim) am sleeping with Raktim for last 45 years. I know, how I passed my 10th exams, how I prepared for IIT, how I behaved with various persons, incidents where I was telling the truth or hiding the facts. Yes, you get coached by your parents/teachers/mentors/managers.

But think of it. In my 45 years of life ( that is around 4,00,000 hours), together my parents/teachers/mentors/managers may have spent maximum of around 40,000 hours with me. That is, only 10% of my total life. So, I only can be the correct judge of knowing, how Raktim is. The same applies to each one of you. You only can know, things which you are good at, things which you enjoy/hate, your strong areas or areas of importance.

Once you introspect & know yourself, you can decide how you want to spend the rest of your life. Now if you want to perform some task, you know, whether you alone can do this or you want to take help from someone because you are not an expert in that area. Remember, no one is perfect. The difference between successful & unsuccessful people is that a successful person knows himself, takes up work in which he is good at and takes help in areas, where he is not good at.

Learning attitude: You need to have curiosity & the ability to learn. Let me give one example here. Say, there are two-person, John & Robert. Both want to learn music. John spends 9 hours daily practice. Robert also spends 9 hours. But he spends 6 hours practicing & the rest 3 hours taking (brutal) feedback from his mentor, doing retrospection of his work & plan for the next day. Now, as per you, who will succeed in the future? I believe, the answer is Robert. The reason is, that Robert is spending time in learning, doing retrospection of what is going right, what is going wrong & planning accordingly.

Pattern finding: You can call this connecting the dots also. Let me give one example here. There are 3 friends, say Ram, John & Sreeni. They felt hungry on Saturday Night. So they drove to search for a good restaurant. While driving, they saw that restaurant named ‘Tasty Foods’ was open. So they went there and ate.

As part of this, Ram learned that the restaurant ‘Tasty Foods’ remains open late at night. So in the future also, he can go to ‘Tasty Foods’ and eat.

John realized that ‘Tasty Foods’ was near ‘railway station’. So he concluded that shops/restaurants/hotels near ‘railway station’ normally remain open, late at night. So if he goes to another city, if needed, he can go near the railway station in that city & can get a restaurant.

Sreeni realized that the ‘railway station’ is a transportation hub. So, I go to any other transportation hub ( say ‘bus station’ or ‘airport’..), he can get a restaurant, which remains open, late in the night.

So according to me, Sreeni is good at finding patterns and he will be more successful in life.