Cloud App Security – An improved way of augmenting security

Are you relying solely on a firewall for security? Is it the same firewall that everyone has been using for a few years? Don’t you believe with everything migrating to the cloud, some cloud-based security solution is required? 

To leverage the benefit of cloud-based solutions, one must balance supporting access and protecting critical data. Cloud App Security Broker is one such mediator.

What is Cloud App Security Broker (CASB)?

CASB acts as a gatekeeper who regulates the access between your enterprise users and the cloud resources they use regardless of geographical location and user devices. It safeguards your cloud services and resources by enforcing security policies. It identifies a security gap in cloud use by monitoring and controlling user activities and sensitive data. It can be easily integrated with SaaS, IaaS, & PaaS.

One of the most popular CASB is Microsoft Cloud App Security.

Why do you need a CASB?

A CASB is required to monitor your cloud services and apps. Shadow IT discovery and app governance are its widely used use-cases. If your organization is using VM (Virtual Machines), cloud-based storage, and network resources, CASB will help you in regulating and securing your environment.      

It improves security by:-

• Discovering and providing visibility on app use
• Monitoring user activities for anomalous behavior
• Giving better control over your resources
• Preventing critical information leak
• Assessing compliance of cloud services

How does CASB help?

CASB provides a wide range of capabilities to secure your environment in various aspects that are as follow:

A. Visibility:

1. It scans all the services and assigns them risk ranking.
   1. It keeps track of users and third-party apps which can log in.
   1. It investigates the usage pattern and assesses the risk levels.

B. Data Confidentiality and Security

1. It classifies information as sensitive or non-sensitive and controls the exposure of sensitive information.
2. It responds to classified labels on content accordingly.
3. Provides an automated process to apply control in your apps in real-time.

C. Protection against Threat

1. It provides an analysis of user and entity behavior.
2. It helps in mitigating malware & ransomware by detecting unusual behavior.
3. It offers adaptive access control.
4. It detects compromised users and rogue applications.

D. Checking Compliance

1. It provides tools such as dashboards and reports for better governance.
2. It assists in checking regulatory compliance requirements and industry standards.
3. Protects against data leaks to non-compliant apps

 Cloud App Security architecture

Cloud App Security provides the following components to integrate visibility:

A.   Cloud Discovery

It identifies your environment and the application that your organizations are using. This process uses traffic logs to discover the apps dynamically. You can also upload log files manually from firewalls and proxies to create a report of the organization’s cloud usage.

B.    Sanctioning and Un-sanctioning Apps

You can use Cloud App Catalog present in cloud app security to sanction or unsanctioned apps. Microsoft Cloud App Security has a catalog of over 16,000 cloud apps ranked on industry standards. You can rate your application on industry standards, regulatory certificates, and best practices. These scores let you know how risky your app is. A detailed list of risk factors is also available in it.

C.    App Connectors

App connectors help you in integrating cloud app security to other cloud apps. A Cloud app administrator grants permission to Cloud app security to access the app. The Cloud App Security gathers activity logs and scans the data, accounts, and cloud content. After such thorough analysis, cloud app security enforces policies, detects threats, and provides necessary governance actions for resolving the issue.

Cloud App Security uses cloud service provider’s APIs that come with their own set of limitations (like throttling, API limits, and dynamic time-shifting API windows). The Cloud app security engines utilize the allowed capacity to gather required data.

D.   Conditional App Access Control

It uses reverse proxy architecture to have real-time visibility and control over access to tasks performed within the cloud environment. Data encryption rules are determined here. It also gives you insights about unsafe endpoints.

E.    Policy Control

You can use policies

1. To define users’ behavior in the cloud.
   1. To detect risky behavior and violation
   1. To look for suspicious data points
   1. To lay out remedial action to mitigate the risks.

Cloud Migration is at a high pace. However, you need to take care of potential security risks. It will help you in getting ahead of everyone in the game. There is nothing more dangerous than an unsecured cloud application as it is highly exposed. So, Cloud App Security is much more of a necessity than a booming tech-invention. 

For more information, reach out to us at contact.us@virtuetechinc.om

Top IoT Security Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) market globally achieved $100 billion revenue for the first time in the year 2017, and this number is predicted to rise up to $1.6 trillion by the year 2025. The technology is predicted to step forward more than we can imagine. Alongside the increase in the popularity of IoT devices, there will also be a parallel boost in IoT app development and the related security challenges and issues as well.

Today, it is not only the interaction between humans and computers, but also various other “things” that interact with the Internet without the human intervention. IoT is amazing in many ways. But the fact remains that technology has not matured yet and neither it is entirely safe.

The whole IoT environment still encompasses many security threats of which we are throwing light on the 5 most important ones here –

I.     Dearth of Agreement on the part of IoT manufacturers – The IoT world comes up with new devices daily with undetected susceptibilities. The primary source of most of the IoT Security related concerns is the lack of manufacturers’ time and resources. This therefore becomes IoT’s biggest security issue. Along with the inadequacy of universal IoT Security standards, manufacturers continue to create devices with poor security. 

Following are some security risks in IoT devices from the manufacturer –  

II. Missing user knowledge and awareness – although Internet users have now learned to avoid spam and phishing mails, and secure their systems by performing virus scans and their networks with strong passwords. 

But IoT being relatively a new technology makes people unaware of its challenges. 

Alongside manufacturers, business processes and users can also create big security risks. That is why Users ignorance and lack of knowledge becomes one of the biggest iot security risks. 

III. Device update management – A vulnerable software or firmware is another big treat to IoT security. Though the manufacturer can sell devices with the most recent software updates, it is highly likely that new susceptibilities may arise.

Updates are integral to maintain the security of IoT devices. These should be updated as soon as any exposure is detected. Unlike most computers or smartphones that get updated automatically, some of the IoT devices are still being used without the necessary updates.

One more concern with device update is that the device will send its backup to the Cloud suffering short downtimes. During these downtimes, if the connection is not encrypted and the update files are unprotected, then hackers may be exposed to sensitive information.

Conclusion: IoT and security today don’t go hand-in-hand with each other always. And, with more discoveries in the IoT world, the security challenges will keep emerging. Organisations and the governments now need to create IoT standards that are accepted universally. This will help to control security in homes, cities, manufacturing plants, and other locations.

IoT is emerging as a trend in these last few years. List of smart devices that we never thought would need an internet connection are increasing like smart toothbrushes, mirrors, beds, pillows, tables and so on. The world continues to turn into a network of things collecting our personal sensitive information.

We are limited only by our imagination today. Alongside all these innovations, can we imagine the amount of important data that could be stolen by the hackers from these devices if there a security breach. So, today if we want our devices to be smart, we must secure them as well.

Is your organisation ready to shift the mindsets to get the maximum out of these IoT innovations. Reach out to us today to discuss how your business and you can start benefitting from this mystic world of IoT.

IoT Security concerns & Risks: Is it the Internet of uncertain Things?

IoT has been a buzzword for many years. IoT has provided value-adding insights. Be it in improving your lifestyle at home, offices, or smartly manufacturing and consuming products. Earlier, due to limited commercialisation and sluggish development, IoT was not within reach of everyone. With recent innovations and progression, 50 million devices have been connected with IoT by 2020.  

The success of IoT depends on the confidentiality of data while mitigating security risks. What should we know more about IoT security?

Major IoT Challenges

Security is the biggest challenge in IoT. IoT improves communications among devices. We leverage the benefit of the transmitted data. Security is a vital concern where data is transmitted to the Internet. Some of the challenges of IoT are:

a.    Data Security

With continuous transmitting of data to the Internet, it is important to secure against theft and tempering. Different types of threats present to the data are:

1. Data Leakage: Hackers with malicious intents have an eye for such devices where data is readily available to them. Such leakage of data can grant access to personal information and monitoring of the data.
2. Dos Attacks: Attackers may send bulk messages to the IoT-enabled devices. As a result, the device will be unable to perform proper functionalities. It is necessary to detect and block unauthorized access to prevent Dos attack.
3. Falsification: The attacker may collect the data packets and replace them with false information. It may change the functioning of the IoT devices entirely.

b.    Data Privacy

Data is abundantly available these days that is a trade-off against data privacy. It is used to draw, analyze and implement the insights. Such data is sensitive and highly confidential. Improper security measures will lead to the breaching of data privacy.

c.     Lack of trust in users

The benefits of IoT are unquestionable. But security attacks, lack of common security standards keep businesses away from IoT. Besides these, users cautious of the consequences of security breaches.  A recent survey shows that 90% of consumers do not trust IoT device security.

Preventive measures for security concerns

            The first step for any IoT business will be to go through security risk assessment to determine vulnerabilities in devices, network systems, user, and customer backend systems. IoT security can be classified into system security, application security, and network security.

• System Security: It mainly focuses on overall IoT systems to identify security challenges, design security frameworks, and provide necessary guidelines.
• Network Security: It deals with securing the IoT communication network that communicated with different IoT devices. Several data encryption and SSL (secure socket layer) techniques can be implemented to establish network security. Blocking of bad requests and unauthorized access must be implemented to secure the network. 
• Application Security: It represents the handling of security issues in applications according to scenario requirements. It will effectively reduce data leakage charges. Applications must have their authentication algorithms. They will increase security and will act as a roadblock for attackers in case network security is compromised.

Conclusion

As IoT is scaling and expanding geographically, it is more prone to security attacks. These risks must be evaluated and mitigated as the data is sensitive.  

Why is tool autonomy important for Gen Z, millennials at the workplace?

Generation Z will soon become the most populous generation on the earth surpassing Millennials. In the US, they constitute approx. 25% of the total population.

As Gen Zers are stepping into the front line on the world stage, their entry’s effect is rippling through the workplace, retail, and technology.

What young generations look for in the workplace?

Gen Zers look for a workplace that adopts speed of evolution. They are excited to work on new things with less pay than a better-paying dull job. They seek the involvement of bleeding-edge technology.  Gen Zers are technologically savvy people, innovators, entrepreneurs with strong opinions, and a desire to be heard.

One of the factors is the Autonomy of the work.  These people aspire to work in a decentralized environment where they get to decide how work gets done.  According to a survey, 42% of the people switch to a job where they can work independently, and 63% move to those jobs which allow flextime.

The most widely used applications are office productivity tools (such as Microsoft Office, Google Suite), collaborative tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack), and business intelligence tools (like PowerBI, Tableau). Gen Zers have incredible knowledge of technology.  Office productivity tools are a top priority as it is a demand for cloud-based tools for remote work. And selecting from a list of work tools is on the higher priority side.

Freedom to choose the technology and the work tools will help in building a mutually beneficial relationship. Gen Zers and millennials welcome new technology whole-heartedly for daily work. The fresh blood of the workforce will be leaders of innovation. They are likely to feel disappointed if their work is not at par with the current technologies. 

Businesses depending on generational data are prone to introduce ageism into the workplace. The companies with age-diversification see a lower rate of attrition. In high-stakes business, companies must lookout for talent in technologies. Overemphasis on age may be catastrophic for business.  By 2030, millennials and Gen Z will make the majority of the workforce. Hence, the market dynamics compel the leaders to be aware of tool deployment in the workplace.

Another crucial factor is Belongingness.  The new generation of the workforce seeks a deeper sense of connections. They are more likely to work in a place where their opinions are heard, considered, and implemented (if found feasible and fruitful).

The last one on the list is Growth opportunities.  They seek continuous skill development and new growth opportunities at work. A study shows, 4 out of 5 young workers said that the chance to learn a new skill is their topmost criteria while considering a new job.

Conclusion

Many people look into the new technologies offered to them while moving out from their current job. Incorporation of cutting-edge technologies is next to mandatory according to market dynamics. It is one of the vital factors which attract Gen Z and millennials. We need to ponder upon these aspects to benefit everyone.

You can share with us about how young blood has improved your workplace at contact.us@virtuetechinc.com.

Why the Internet of Behaviours (IoB) is important for your business?

A decade ago, the Internet of things was the new buzzing word for everyone. As time passed, the applicative part of the Internet of things increased. In the past five years, IoT devices doubled in number. They are found everywhere from a fitness tracker in your wrist to IoT-enabled appliances in your home. These devices have changed how we interact with the world around us.

The collection of data and its usage has empowered us to find users’ interests, preferences, and behavior. That is how the Internet of behavior is born. By 2023, Gartner has predicted that 40% of the global population’s activities will be tracked digitally to understand the behavior and influence it.

Let’s know more about what the internet of behaviour is; how it can help you with your business and what some of its common applications are.

Introduction to Internet of Behaviour

You can say it is an extension of IoT (Internet of things). IoT has linked people with their actions. Internet of behavior tells us more about how people make a decision, is there any predictable pattern in so-called ‘unpredictable human behavior’. Knowledge of these patterns helps in influencing them to use a product or service.  IOB is a combination of technology, data analytics, and behavioral sciences.

Consider an example of an e-commerce application where you frequently browse and shop. IOB will help us to find out from where you buy a product, what kind of product you generally look at, at what time you are most likely to buy something. Service effectiveness grows exponentially with such personalized insights.

Analyzing consumer behavior is not a new thing. IOB provides an automated environment that collects and interprets the humongous amount of data we generate daily. IOB adds a human psychological perspective to data analytics.

Impacts of psychologically analyzing human behavior are:

• Improvement in development of user experience (UX)
• Search-experience Optimization (SXO)
• Better promoting strategies for products and services.

Advantages of IOB

• Knowledge of customer buying habits
• Analyzing how a user interacts with devices and products
• Deep insights into customer behavior in the buying journey
• Provide a real-time point of target ads and sale notification
• Better customer service in resolving the issues.

Applications of IOB In digital marketing

The impact of IOB cannot be foregone today, as it will affect and alter consumer behavior. It will influence marketing platforms to lure their attention.  Multiple sub-domains in digital marketing that will help you to boost your business are 

a.    Big data

You can access information from multiple points of contact using IoT. It helps in overviewing a customer’s journey from his interest in the product to the point of purchase. It will help you to create more positive communication points to quicken the purchase process.

b.    Market Research 2.0

Till today, collecting and processing data with IoT is quite complex and inaccessible to many companies. However, big giants like Google, Facebook are a step ahead. They are well versed in researching the data and develop tailor-made offerings to the customers.

Consider an example; have you ever get the feeling of someone had read your mind when you see products recommended for your list? Have you seen a product on an e-commerce website or in an advertisement about which you were speaking with one of your friends?

These companies have developed algorithms that will look into historic data and assess the present situation. That is how highly personalized recommendation lists are created.

c.     Access to Consumer lifestyle

Internet of behavior studies consumer behavior based on data collected from various social media and other platforms. Data is also collected from our day-to-day use of IoT devices like fitness bands, coffee makers, kitchen appliances, etc. Data collected will be used to draw inferences on each user’s lifestyle.

Suppose I consume 4 cups of coffee daily. So the marketers will suggest to me all kinds of coffee brands and products that I am most likely to buy. That is how getting a fair idea of your lifestyle can amplify your sales.

d.     Improved SEO

Earlier, search engines used to recognize keywords. These keywords improved the quality and quantity of traffic redirecting to your website. But now with artificial intelligence-based assistants like (Alexa, Siri), search engines are focusing more on the intent of the user. That calls for change in the SEO content approach focusing more on intent rather than the keywords used.

Other Applications

• Amazon gift shop: Amazon has built an AI-based gift shop that suggests gifts for our near and dear ones. They keep a record of buying preferences and shopping habits to give personalized gift suggestions.
• Barista facial cognition coffee shop: Barista has developed a facial recognition system that will analyze the age, sex, and mood of the person. Based on the past orders and the current parameters, it will suggest an appropriate drink.

Summary

By 2025, 50% of the world population will use IOB. In the coming years, IOB will be an ecosystem that defines human behaviour in a digital world. IOT extracts information for you but developing the wisdom out of it is the job of IOB.

Let us know how you are going to apply IOB in your business @ contact.us@virtuetechinc.com

Reasons for Advertisers to Embrace New Technology

With the change in the decade, fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning have grown into an area of application than just being the area of research. And their applications have seeped into our daily lives. Today, we embrace these advancements rather than fearing them.

Have you wondered how Amazon has recommended the products that were on your mind? Personalized playlists on Spotify are another example of AI application. And the most widely used application is Netflix. Netflix uses AI and algorithms to find a pattern in the content you watch & your streaming timing. These observations help them deliver high-value recommendations. In the B2B context, imagine if you have advertised your product at the exact time when the user is most likely to browse or purchase your product or service.

 Now, marketers are listening and learning more about their customers for better engagement with them. AI and ML create deep engagement with personalized content that is inch-perfect. The knowledge of the customer helps them in boosting their sales effectively using customized emails, web, and social media.

Some of the most common AI & machine learning applications are:

1. Chatbots that provide 24/7 customer service.
2. Generating substantial content which saves resources and time. The generated templates help in producing unique content that gives the impression of human work.
3. Product recommendation
4. Image recognition, Visual search, & Voice search that has exalted the shopping experience.
5. Sentiment Analysis and social listening
6. Sales forecasting and predictive analysis
7. Digital Advertising & Ad targeting
8. Dynamic pricing

Roadmap to apply AI in your business

The first step is to learn about AI and its application in marketing to solve your problems. What is the difference between an inferential AI model and a deterministic marketing model? AI is capable of solving specific problems but when applied in the right way. AI can provide insights about how to communicate with customers, how to create the right content.

Let’s look into the simple  steps required to implement AI into your business.

1.    Know the difference between AI and ML

Terms AI and machine learning is used interchangeably. AI refers to the ability of machines to think and imitate human behavior.

While ML is a part of AI which believes machines can learn from data and can take decisions without human intervention.

2.     State your business requirements

Clearly define the objectives that you wish to achieve using these two technologies. It may be an outcome you want to achieve, a problem you desire to overcome, or a business expansion motive. Look out if you have the required data and what additional data you need.

3.    Prioritise the main motive

Watch the value drivers such as increased value for customers or business. Identify the potential business and financial benefits of the AI project.

4.    Evaluate your potential

Decide on the strategy for implementing your AI project. You can build it from scratch, buy something readymade, collaborate with someone to implement, and outsource the development.

5.     Consult an AI expert

If you don’t have AI expertise with you, consider consulting one outside your business.

6.    Prepare your data

Learning abilities of AI algorithm depends on the data you provide them. Therefore, it is crucial to have high-quality clean data ready.

7.    Start with a small implementation

Start with a small dataset and check if AI fulfils the objectives of its implementation. AI integration will play a significant role in staying ahead of the competitors.

Let us know how you have leveraged the benefit of AI at contact.us@virtuetechinc.com

6 reasons to switch to Power BI to boost business intelligence

Data is the oxygen of modern businesses. We are generating it more than ever. But stacking up a massive amount of data is useless unless organizations make sense out of it. That is where business intelligence comes into the picture.

If you are looking for picking useful and actionable insights from the data, you have landed at the right place.  Let’s know more about Microsoft’s business intelligence software Power BI and its application.

An introduction to Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence suite that allows even a non-technical business user to collate, analyze, visualize and share data. It has a user-friendly interface. It merges the data and transforms it into insights, using visually compelling and easy-to-comprehend graphs and charts. This helps users to visualize what is happening in their business.

Power BI can be easily integrated with other Microsoft applications, spreadsheets, cloud-based and on-premise apps. It is versatile enough for connecting as Windows desktop application (Power BI Desktop), SaaS (software as a service) service (Power BI Service), and mobile BI apps available for android as well as iOS devices.

The best part is that Power Bi is based on MS-EXCEL which makes its learning easier.

Uses of Power BI in a nutshell

Power BI is used to draw insights from an organization’s data. It can connect disparate data sets, transform data into a data model and create graphs or charts for visual purposes. Data models, charts, and graphs can be shared with other users within the organization.

The data models created are used in data visualization and examining the probable scenarios within the data. Power BI reports can answer the questions in real-time and help in predictive forecasting. It also provides executive dashboards for administrators and managers, giving more insights into the department’s performance.

Let us find out why Power BI is the most preferred business intelligence solution.

1.    Easily usable

Power BI has a user-friendly interface that gives you the flexibility to select attributes for your report. This intelligent tool can even be used by non-technical users for reporting and data visualization purposes. The FAQ feature of Power BI is capable of answering your queries in a highly visualized manner. The answers in the form of charts and graphs make analyzing and forecasting an easy task to accomplish. With a simple interface, seamless selection of attributes, and drag & drop feature of power BI, its usage is much easier than others.

2.    Highly Collaborative 

To achieve business objectives multi-disciplinary personnel are involved. Power BI facilitates better collaboration.  Its inbuilt connectors allow you to connect to several different data sources from Microsoft, Salesforce, and other vendors. One can collate between various workspaces. For example, one can utilize data present in a unit to create visualizations in another workspace and publish it to a larger audience using other cloud-based applications.  These interaction capabilities help in mitigating the queries that a user might face during report generation.

3.    Analytics integration with cloud

Power BI services are available on the cloud too. Microsoft provides data security patches to keep the data safe from malicious intrusion. Power BI desktop application is used for the report, dashboard generation, and Power BI Service (its own SaaS) is used to share reports and other visualizations on the cloud with authorized users.

4.    Predict the future of your business

Anticipatory predictive analysis helps in creating the forecast. These forecasts help in improving your current business scenarios when compared with the goals set for the future. The effective data modeling ability of the Power BI computes the probable scenarios and comes up with the best-suited solution. Its statistical algorithms analyze past historical data and derive futuristic and reliable outcomes. The main reason why many organizations look for Power BI reports as they are handy and case-based.

5.    Customer-centric tool

 Power BI tool removes the dependency on technical staff. This tool is easy to use and deploy. It is a robust business intelligence solution that can analyze and radically transform through its inbuilt intelligence. Dashboards generated using power BI are highly customized and customer centric. It can handle the changing dimensions of the data in the most productive manner. 

6.    Effective Database Monitoring Environment

The activity log feature of Power BI generates a report of log data of the past ninety days. It helps in identifying the issues and determines the probability of outages and maintenance issues. Another add-on feature named Power BI System Center Configuration Manager assists in monitoring the health of the server in the cloud environment and creates visual reports on malware security of the entire system.

Conclusion

In the era of digital transformation and business intelligence, data plays a significant role in decision-making. To make intelligent decisions, you need to have a tool that effectively serves your business motto and assures maximum yield for the business. Power BI helps you in gaining insights that are actionable and valuable. A wide range of collaborative applications and services, prompt service of Power BI have helped power BI achieve the top rank among all reporting tools. Selecting Power BI over others will be a wise business decision.

The Reality behind the Economic Feasibility of the Serverless Architecture

Is your application undergoing the journey of migration to the cloud? Are you too looking for cloud service providers to enhance your application? Well, this article is a must-read for you.

Moving to the cloud is the new normal in a tech-savvy environment. Who does work on on-premise tools and applications? But it does not spare the organizations from mismanaging their migration process and ending up paying a huge amount of money for the cloud services used. Not everything needs to be on the cloud. 

While you are busy cherry-picking the applications and services to move, you often refrain from questioning the vitality of the cloud services, platforms, applications purchased. To answer such questions, a new concept of serverless architecture is introduced.  Serverless architecture or FaaS (Function as a Service) let you deploy an individual “function”, logic or a piece of business logic. They are expected to start within milliseconds, process individual requests, and then the requests end.

The major advantage of using it over traditional, server-based solutions or complete solutions on the cloud is reduced costs of building and running software systems.  Though it may appear to be cost-saving, IT operations may not be cheaper for all workloads.

To gear you up for a more advanced version of cloud utilization, let’s critically analyze the essentials of serverless architecture.

Money-Saving pay-per-use FaaS

With the launching of AWS Lambda by amazon web services, FaaS is going to be another milestone in the evolution of cloud computing.  It will change how we deploy and operate software systems in the future. This pay-per-use model is used by FaaS services such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. It is a key argument in building cloud-native systems.

Actual pricing involved for function execution

Currently, invocation costs of function are incredibly cheap (20 cents for a million invocations for both AWS Lambda and Azure Functions). However, it is not the entire cost of providing such a service. It is not even the vital element in the total cost associated with FaaS computing.

The execution of function takes up significant compute resources. Both AWS and Azure charge for the allocated memory and execution time (rounded up to 100 milliseconds) of the function. While, AWS charges $0.00001667 for every GB-sec used, Azure Functions charge $0.000016 for every GB-sec used. The unit price might seem low but look out for the rising costs.

The amount of allocated memory varies between 128MB to 1.5GB depending upon the configuration. The cost of the most effectiuve configuration for 100ms of execution time will be more expensive as 12 times than that of the basic 128MB configuration.

Even, after considering these factors, the costs of AWS Lambda are approx $1.25 for 500ms execution time, 128MB memory, and 1 million function invocation.

Free Trial Version to Familiarise FaaS

AWS and Azure are trying to lure people with a lucrative free offer of 1mn invocations and 400,000GB-sec each month. It is enough to run a function using 128MB memory round the clock for the entire month.

Price competition between FaaS and IaaS

Cloud providers have also lowered the cost of IaaS. A tiny instance of AWS IaaS will cost only $4.25 for an entire month.  It is better and cheaper than running a function continuously for a month. It would be a mistake to use FaaS for large instances where high processing power is needed to process through a large volume of data.

Load fluctuations

Real-world workloads show moderate load fluctuations. For this, additional load-balanced instances have to be commissioned that increases the costs per hour.  So, most companies use some form of container-based capacity provisioning.  Substantial savings are offered by cloud providers for committing a compute infrastructure for a year or few years in advance. But isn’t this similar to the old traditional way of stacking up the on-premise applications?

On the other hand, FaaS provides on-demand compute capacity that costs as per usage. It fosters out-of-the-box scalability and availability.

Evidence of price reduction when going serverless

 For running an AWS-based 3-tier web application that serves 100,000 page views a month. It would require a minimum load balancer, 2 web servers, 2 application servers, and an all-time available database server. The solution would require other services such as DynamoDB, Route53, and CloudFront. It is estimated to transfer 120 GB of data each month.

The total cost for these would be $894.45 per month, of which EC2 accounts for 55% and Database services accounts for the rest.

   Using Serverless Architecture, prices will fall drastically. Assuming a sluggish 3 second processing time for every page view and 1 GB of memory allocation, the cost of AWS Lambda would be approx $5.

The Pitfall in optimizing infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

If you counter the above example with optimizing IaaS, the following are the major setbacks:

1. You will end up with a long-term commitment to keep your solution online.
2. You will introduce potential capacity problems due to the introduction of unfit infrastructure.

Not only IaaS, but FaaS also has its cons too

Regardless of cost saving capabilities, there are the following watchpoints while using a serverless architecture.

• No guarantee of cost-saving: There are some processes and workloads which require substantial computing resources that nullify the cost-effectiveness of FaaS. Functional and technical requirements should be reviewed and matched against the limitations associated with the FaaS environment.  Proactively, cost calculation is required before implementing it.
• Watch out for retires: If a function fails, it would be retired till the event restores. So it’s important to check costs regularly to scrutinize any sudden spike in infrastructure costs.
• Overheads: Some applications such as AWS Kinesis and DynamoDB require provisioned capacity that leads to overheads if improperly managed. Luckily, it is possible to manage AWS using SDK using which an automated capacity regulatory solution can be built.

In a Nutshell

While economic benefit is eye-catching but it should not be the only criteria to consider FaaS offerings. The prime objective should be to build small, independent, and focused business unit that can be delivered quickly and cheaply. Keep a sharp eye on how serverless computing can benefit your cloud architecture.

To learn more about how you can incorporate FaaS in your existing solution, get in touch with us at contact.us@virtuetechinc.com .

Changing face of data analytics in organisations

We live in a world where data is a business asset. It is revolutionising the way companies operate across almost every sector and industry. With the ever-growing smart world, data becomes the key to gain a competitive advantage. In the coming time, an organisation’s ability to compete will be directly proportional to its ability to analyse data and take leverage of it.

According to the International Institute of Analytics, in 2020 companies with analytics saw $450 billion as productivity benefit over the companies who are not using the data.

A few years back picture

A few years back when data analytics was the new term on every mind. Companies were focusing more on the implementation of data analytics in their organization. Following were the key points on which companies focused back then.

• A smart strategy was as necessary as the volume of data. It did not matter what data was available, what data you are collecting, and what your competitors were storing. It did not matter whether your organization had data ready to be analyzed at your disposal or next to zero.  A good strategy was more about what your business wants to achieve, how data could help you get you there than what data is available or potential ready.  
• Finding out the right data: It required the definition of how you wanted to use the data. After deciding what you wanted to gain from data, the primary objective was to source and collect the best data.
• Data to insights generation: A plan was laid out about the application of data analytics to your data to extract business-critical insights. It would result in better decision making, improved operations, and more value generation.
• Meeting infrastructure requirements: The next step was to decide upon the software and hardware that would help you in the generation of insights from the raw data.
• Boosting data competencies: It was essential to cultivate data-crunching skills. The main two options were to educate your in-house talent and outsource the data analysis.
• Data governance: Since data was and is a part of critical and personal information. Collecting and storing it brought legal and regulatory obligations. Hence, companies needed to incorporate data ownership, privacy, and data security into their data strategy.

FACT TO KNOW: 55% of North American businesses have adopted big data analytics.

Current and Upcoming Scenario

Accessible tools have brought tech and business into a tightly coupled relationship. Amid rabid competition, data drives the most efficient decisions in the supply chain, marketing, and IT industries.

To expedite the advantages of data analytics, one of the major proposed changes is the removal of a standalone data analyst role. Companies are expanding the job requirement for their corporate employees to inculcate data analytics skills. The same applies to the hiring of new employees. They must have skills or a fair sense of tools for data analytics.

Today, data analytics is seen as part of every role in the organizations.  It has fuelled data literacy throughout the company. Partnering with a subject matter expert with tech-savvy employees will yield the most.  Imagine the benefit when these two skill sets are available with one employee. It will not only speed-up the data analytics process but will also lead to the most effective leveraging of the data.

If you are not coping-up with these changes, if you are unable to analyze the dataset, draw conclusions and make decisions based on them, you are not fit for survival in the jungle of corporate.

 Another subset of the futuristic approach to data analytics is modeling data skills. Businesses know the importance of data analytics strategy. Organizations must invest in building reusable platforms if they want to say bye to traditional roles of data analyst or data scientist. With data analytics skilled business users, they will focus on extracting insights from raw data. The IT team can specialize in building data platforms.

Problems with this change will be a probable rise in data quality issues as business users will extract the data. Secondly, these business users must mind the data silos.

On the other side, organizations that wish to implement data analytics but face analytics scarcity will welcome this change whole-heartedly. The organizations combating analytics scarcity has two options. Either teach technical experts the business contexts or train subject matter experts in technology platforms. The fastest way out is to pair both the departments to meet the company’s needs.

Along with, an expanded skill set of everyone; we should expect technology to be more business user friendly. Even with ease in access to data tools, demand for roles related to data science has grown by 46% since 2019, according to LinkedIn’s report.

The need of the hour is to reinvent old traditional data science roles by asking, what are the new ways of delivering the platform and services. To make the most out of the data, companies should rely on advanced technology and forge their business and technology decisions as one. This agility will new your organisation’s new strength.

 Let us know what you think of this article in the comments or you can also reach out to us @ contact.us@virtuetechinc.com

4 Cloud Trends to Look Out For in 2021

As businesses become more agile to the current situation, there is a significant rise in cloud migration. As a result, SaaS vendors have seen an increase in customers.

The year 2020 was the year of adapting to the changed way of life due to the pandemic. It led to a shift to remote working. Consequently, organisations had made hasty cloud migration decisions. Cloud migration made in such a little time tends to be more unorganised. The year 2021 is, therefore, said to be the year of cleansing for such organisations.

The migration to the cloud in 2021 isn’t going to slow down as businesses are strategising to leverage the cloud demand. Vendors will reap benefits from this too. SaaS vendors have benefited from mass-scale remote work that has also caused a boom in the cloud market. It is expected to see a rise in cloud infrastructure deployments and spending to accommodate efficient remote working outside the traditional office environment.

For the second successive year, Cloud has made it to the top three ranks for businesses’ IT investment priorities. With business continuity as the main motive, other priorities fell to the wayside in 2020. In 2021, organizations are preparing to opt for cloud solution in every department. 4 new cloud trends to watch out for are:

Getting Rid of Unnecessary cloud workloads

An unplanned movement to the cloud results in a ‘lift and shift’ model where complete application is pushed to the cloud. It is an outdated strategy that exhausts your cloud storage capacity and levies an unnecessary burden on the cloud.

Till June 2020, 40% of businesses were rushing to migrate to the cloud. But in this rush, the cloud has not been used judiciously. It is found that as much as 93% of the businesses have misconfigured cloud storage services.

Proper planning and reconfiguring the cloud will minimize your costs, reduce burden, and maximize profits in the long-term. Using a public cloud was a necessity to survive in the pandemic time. But moving forward, businesses must check other models such as the hybrid cloud as ideal for operations.

The task of weighing the pros and cons of the cloud is not a duty of the IT department only. Cloud knowledge has become more mainstream now. Management and Leadership members must watch closely to ensure cloud decisions benefiting their departments too.

Rethinking Cloud Governance

Security has been on the top charts for businesses. They are thinking of restructuring cloud governance to strengthen their cloud strategy.

Moving to the clouds’ foundation and developing a good governance plan will help businesses fortify their security infrastructure to rectify the hasty cloud adoption. IT departments are working to level up cloud security. In July, about 96% of the 3500 respondents to a Sophos survey raised an eyebrow over cloud security.

Everybody was under the impression that VPN would withstand the burden of remote working of the entire workforce. However, they failed to notice that working on different laptops and different networks is a roadblock while working on the VPN.  

Any business related to banking or financial service is looking to secure their workloads. Planned cyber attacks have forced organizations to ramp up cloud security strategies to avoid becoming the next prey. Hybrid cloud is one of the best solutions as it balances both security and cost.

More Cloud Investments

As businesses are largely adopting the cloud, vendors are stepping up to share the wealth.

Cloud businesses were among top-notch performers with a growing market for their services in the year 2020. This year it is expected that the global public cloud infrastructure will grow 35% to $120 billion, says Dave Bartoletti, vice president, and principal analyst at Forrester.

Companies have ramped up their acquisitions to reposition them into SaaS. That helped in surviving and capitalizing on the new ways of working and living in the pandemic-stricken world.

Recently, to sustain more market growth, the new Covid-19 legislation is signed into law in December. This law equips businesses with the resources for continuing in the cloud investments. The paycheck protection program is also updated to include allowances for software and cloud upgrades for qualified companies.

Mega vendors are continuing their reign.  More than 50% of respondents of the Flexera Survey will increase their investments in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, Google, and other cloud services. Microsoft Azure is ruling as the top choice.

Training the Workforce

While Vendors and Cloud investments are growing, cloud computing companies focus on spreading technical knowledge with free trainings.

In 2021, we will see more multi-cloud strategies with a wide range of training initiatives from both enterprises and cloud service providers. Businesses are keen to train cloud architects and professionals as they play a crucial role in the migration of applications to the cloud.

Microsoft and AWS will train over 20 million people on the cloud. It will boost entry-level cloud knowledge in the future. It will also allow advanced cloud technologists to innovate and reinvent.

Such a cloud boom will pave the way for transformation. Edge computing is more likely to rise. In the coming years, cloud innovation will mean ‘while core data centers will remain essential, the volume will increasingly focus on edge devices operating on AI’, says Brandon Ebken, CTO at Insight Enterprises.

How your organisation is coping with this cloudification of the application? Please let us know through comments. For cloud-related assistance, reach out to us at – contact.us@virtuetechinc.com