Close
We enable business and digital transformation decisions through the delivery of cutting-edge ICT solutions and products...
To choose between native and third-party low-code tools, cloud application development teams need to weigh the benefits of consolidation against the risk of lock-in.
s the adoption of no-code and low-code platforms grow, some… Continue reading
Implementing better network segmentation to improve security is a significant project for network operations, data center ops, and security teams. From dividing IoT from IT using micro-segmentation to avoiding over-segmentation, we call out best practices for maximizing success in this task.
• The segmentation requirements for an enterprise call for a highly customized design.
• Avoiding either over-segmenting or under-segmenting the network is achievable but requires a formal project.
• Outsourcing segmentation project planning tends to result in poor outcomes. Too often, trust is placed in less trusted components, often resulting in segmentation projects being delayed or restarted, or with results that place the enterprise at undue risk.
• Segment based on data sensitivity, location, and criticality.
• For virtualized environments, change the technology, but not the security principles.
• Create a segmentation architecture that will accommodate short-term technology changes, and will best allow for housing new resources, applications and data within the existing framework.
• Create zones to proactively house Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT). Continue reading
IT managed services based on cloud computing are catching on with many small and medium-sized businesses as a way to offload the burdens of buying and maintaining software and hardware.
The idea is simple: instead of buying and managing your own IT assets, your company pays to use a system owned by a third party. A simple free version of the idea is Google Drive, which allows users
anywhere to work and collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and other applications hosted on Google’s servers.
The cloud’s key benefit is that it saves companies money because they don’t have to purchase, implement, maintain and update hardware or software. For example, some experts estimate a company can save about 65% on an ERP system by implementing it through the cloud rather than buying the software.
The top three IT initiatives for 2018 include business intelligence, artificial intelligence, and big data, according to 451 Research. Digital transformation
Machine learning isn’t only in the cloud. Microsoft is bringing it to PCs in the next Windows 10 release. Here’s how to get started now.
We’re not far away from a new release of Windows 10, and with it plenty of new APIs for your applications. One big change is support for running trained machine learning models as part of Windows applications, taking advantage of local GPUs to accelerate machine learning applications.
Building a machine learning application can be a complex process. Training a model can require a lot of data, and a considerable amount of processing power. That’s fine if you’ve got access to a cloud platform and lots of bandwidth, but what if you want to take an existing model from GitHub and run it on a PC?
Trained machine learning models are an ideal tool for bringing the benefits of neural networks and deep learning to your applications. All you should need to do is hook up the appropriate interfaces, and they should run as part of your code. But with many machine learning frameworks and platforms, there’s a need for a common runtime that can use any of the models out there. That’s where the new Windows machine learning tools come into play, offering Windows developers a platform to run existing machine learning models in their applications, taking advantage of a developing open standard for exchanging machine learning models. Continue reading
Cloud-native apps built on Kubernetes can run anywhere. Now, with Open Service Broker, they can also use services hosted in public clouds such as Azure. – Cloud Software Development 
Back in the early 2000s, while working as an architect in an IT consulting company, I became fascinated by the promise of service-oriented architectures. Taking an API-first approach to application development made a lot of sense to me, as did the idea of using a message- and event-driven approach to application integration.
But that dream was lost in a maze of ever-more complex standards. The relatively simple SOAP’s take on remote procedure calls vanished as a growing family of WS- protocols added more and more features.
It’s not surprising, then, that I find much of what’s happening in the world of cloud-native platforms familiar. Today, we’re using many of the same concepts as part of building microservice architectures, on top of platforms like Kubernetes.
Like SOAP, the underlying concept is an open set of tools that can connect applications and services, working in one public cloud, from on-premises systems to a public cloud, and from cloud to cloud. It’s that cross-cloud option that’s most interesting: Each of the three big public cloud providers does different things well, so why not build your applications around the best of Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform? Continue reading
Many businesses undervalue the planning that must go into CRM software selection and overlook the importance of defining the capabilities and results that will matter most to their organization. Don’t be one of them.
The best CRM software is the one that has the right capabilities and features for your objectives. That selection process is harder than it sounds, however, as organizations are faced with an abundance of choices and priorities to consider when determining which customer relationship management (CRM) software can best meet their needs today and into the future.
The CRM journey often begins with a set of circumstances that make the need for better tools abundantly clear, but businesses must carefully evaluate their own requirements, ask serious questions of various vendors and identify the key features of CRM tools that will be most important to their organization before moving forward.
Nadine LeBlanc, research director for CRM at Gartner, says the power of CRM starts with an organization’s business strategy. “It seems simple, but a lot of organizations often think of CRM as a technology… but CRM is a business strategy that optimizes a business’ capability while promoting customer satisfaction and loyalty,” she says.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to CRM and many companies are already performing some version of CRM without recognizing it as such, according to LeBlanc. Any organization that serves its customers’ needs and wishes, or actively requests feedback from customers, has already started the CRM journey, she says. Continue reading
You have a newly designed website and you are now looking for ways to keep improving your search rankings and bring more qualified traffic to your website because more qualified traffic equals more sales.- … Continue reading
Progressive web apps offer many benefits, leading organization
s to take advantage of this trend in mobile app dev. A lack of Apple support stands in the way for some. As performance and user experience become essential to the success of an enterprise mobile app, progressive web apps gain interest — and may eventually become the future standard for mobile development.
Progressive web apps (PWAs) blend the functionalities of traditional web apps with native apps while providing increased speed and performance. Several aspects of the mobile app development landscape today make it primed for this trend to take hold.
“If you’re building a web app today, it should be a PWA,” said Michael Facemire, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “There’s really no reason not to.”
PWAs run on the web but can take advantage of native mobile device features, such as appearing on the home screen and sending push notifications. Google supports PWAs for use on Android device browsers, but Apple does not yet support them for its proprietary browser, Safari, on iPhones or iPads. PWAs differ from hybrid web apps in that they are typically not available for download through native app stores and are built using only web technologies.
For PWAs on Android, a service worker API caches data as the user browses to enable offline support. Most PWAs also include an application shell architecture that allows for fast loading times, transport layer security, and a web app manifest file that allows the app to be installed on the home screen, according to Google’s checklist of features.
There may be no difference between a PWA and a native app from the end user’s perspective. That’s beneficial for IT departments that already have an app interface their users or customers are comfortable with.
That was a big benefit for Nexercise, a health and wellness platform that is currently building a PWA for Sworkit, a fitness application. The Sworkit app was first developed for Apple iOS and Android, then the web and Apple TV. Since its web and native apps already shared some JavaScript code, it made sense to develop a PWA, said David Frahm, director of growth at Nexercise in Silver Spring, Md., who oversaw Sworkit’s development.
“Visually, might look pretty much the same as our web app,” Frahm said. “That would be great, because we have a great app, and we don’t want to change all of that. We get to deliver to users wherever they want us to be, as opposed to being limited to the app store.” Continue reading
The adoption of highly scriptable cloud-based technologies, along with the emergence of continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) tools, has created an environment in which every operations process should be 
scriptable and all manual processes targeted for automation. Organizations with a DevOps approach to application lifecycle management should automate every process imaginable, but they often hit a wall when they reach the persistence layer. Emerging technologies have the potential to make that limitation disappear.- Database automation
“Database release automation is a real problem,” Datical CTO Robert Reeves says. “You’ve got lots of great ways of automating the application and provisioning servers. But we are still asking DBAs (database administrators) to just work faster, work harder, as they do manual updates.”
So, why can’t we take the lessons we learned from Agile or the progress DevOps has made and apply them to the persistence layer?
“Because of state,” Reeves explains. Unlike applications, a database can’t simply be deleted and recreated on the fly as though you were deploying and undeploying a microservice packaged in a Docker container. “You can’t just zap it.”
The persistence layer presents one problem, but there are also unique regulatory, technical and corporate standards issues that affect databases. Continue reading