May 2022 – Xorlogics

#Data : An Important Piece To “The #InternetOfThings” Puzzle

Every day, connected objects generate billions of information that must be processed and analyzed to make them usable. Thanks to the development of connectivity on multiple devices, the arrival of inexpensive sensors, and the data inflation they transmit, IoT have taken an irreplaceable place in our daily lives. IoT Analytics forecasts the IoT market size to grow at a CAGR of 22.0% to $525 billion from 2022 until 2027. The number of connected IoT devices growing 9% to 12.3 billion globally, and cellular IoT now surpassing 2 billion.

These very serious estimations do not, however, take into account the full extent of this digital revolution. If the design of connected objects is the showcase of the IoT and its vast possibilities, it still requires strong skills in the processing of the exploited data collected from sensors terminals, machines, and platforms to interpret it in order to boost productivity and increase performance.

Just as in the jewel market, the big winners are gold/diamond dealers. In the IoT domain, this role is played by companies able to manage the mountains of data generated by these connected devices because the collected data is profoundly changing the way businesses used to operate. Almost every day, new applications are imagined, with consequences at all levels of organizations because the real added value of connected objects only comes from the uses and the ability of companies to create new services.

Several studies demonstrate that companies are still facing a gap between the collection of new data and the presentation of the analyzed information so that it can be understood and explored in great detail, whether it is for a connected house, connected car, or a portable terminal or an industrial solution.

Here below is the list of tips companies must consider before every IOT project implementation:

Sort valuable information among a big volume of data:
Exploiting IoT means generating a huge amount of data. The challenge for companies is to filter the stray information and find the ones that are really important. This is why many companies integrate a flow analysis and a process analysis. The first provides real-time information from data streams such as navigation paths, logs, and measurement data, and the second is to take machine data captures.

Set and manage priorities:
The IoT implies different levels of necessity in terms of urgency and latency. It’s important to take this into account because one expects to interact with the “real world” in real-time. For example, sensors in mines must trigger an alert as soon as they detect the presence of toxic gases. Similarly, other IoT information may not be needed “just in time”, such as regularly collected data to further refine and improve the predictive model itself. This data can potentially be collected and processed several times a day, for example.

Design considerations for IoT technologies:
Information security, privacy, and data protection should systematically be worked at the design stage. Unfortunately, in many cases, they are added on later once the intended functionality is in place. This not only limits the effectiveness of the added-on information security and privacy measures but also is less efficient in terms of the cost to implement them. Although industries are actively working to address this, it stays a major IoT problem.

Cross the Data:
In the case of preventive operations, for example, companies want to collect data from objects (such as smart meters) and cross them with relevant relational data, such as maintenance agreements, warranty information, and life cycle components. It is therefore essential that companies can rely on the data from which they make important decisions.

Tracing the data:
The increased collection of data may raise issues of authentication and trust in the objects. In addition, it should also be noted that by using information collected about and from multiple objects related to a single person, that person may become more easily identifiable and better known. So in order to fully exploit the potential of IoT, tools must be much more flexible and allow users to shape and adapt data in different ways, depending on their needs or those of their organization.

Collaboration between the IT team and business experts is more critical than ever before in analyzing IoT data. In addition to those who understand the data, it takes experts to analyze gathered data from specific devices or sensors. While any analyst can understand the data in the context of a company’s performance indicators, only a data specialist would be able to explain what kind of hidden data contains a wealth of information, and how with the right tools, companies can unleash that potential.

Cloud Computing: Increase Profitability and business Growth

You’ve put a lot of effort into growing your company. That’s why you should use appropriate technology for corporate management. Cost reductions, profitability, and scalability pushed the adoption of cloud computing and modern technologies within companies around the globe. Meanwhile, businesses have also realized that the cloud holds various other advantages: it enables innovation and the development of new products. As a result, it provides competitive advantages, resulting in increased growth and higher profitability. The COVID-19 epidemic and the related changes in the business environment have accelerated cloud adoption worldwide.

The cloud drives profitability and growth

Before implementing new cloud services, businesses must conduct thorough preparation, including extensive cloud readiness assessments and a well-defined onboarding plan. In order to identify a proper combination of public, private, and hybrid cloud systems, the company’s workload requirements as well as its strategic orientation must be considered. Regulations on data protection and storage, such as the GDPR requirements of the European Union and the DSGVO, also add to the complexity of the entire project.

Organizations must maintain the appropriate balance when orchestrating workloads if they really want to achieve optimal performance and take full advantage of significant cloud opportunities. Companies can swiftly migrate workloads and obtain exceptional performance on the cloud platforms thanks to the interconnection between multiple clouds, resulting in improved innovation.

Cloud-native development goes beyond technology and extends to operating models and organizational behaviors. To support cloud-ready transformation, businesses must realign their organizational structures and embrace a culture of lifelong learning, experimentation, and improvement. This is how they will realize and maximize the benefits of technology to their business.

When companies integrate the cloud with artificial intelligence (AI), they are capable to enhance their overall performance through more intelligence, data-driven processes, and a tailored user experience with measurable benefits- this applies to every industry. Organizations can develop data platforms that integrate and unlock company data and deliver deep AI capabilities using on-demand computing capacity in the cloud, allowing them to expand their business with agility and make educated decisions. Organizations will rely significantly on the cloud to unleash new possibilities rather than spending time improving existing processes.

Furthermore, the global COVID-19 pandemic has tremendously increased cloud adoption. Likewise, it has been proven that the cloud – and its implementation in IT systems and business processes – has become synonymous with company resilience. According to the Infosys study Cloud Radar 2021, with over 2,500 respondents from companies across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, companies with 80% or more of their business functions in the cloud reported a stronger ability to unlock value from data and AI using the cloud. By 2022, more than 40 percent of enterprises surveyed plan to shift over 60 percent of systems into the cloud, from 17 percent today. Whether in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, or financial services, cloud technologies have provided firms resiliency and enabled them to respond rapidly in the wake of lockdowns and social distancing.

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from the cloud, regardless of their industry. Profitability, on the other hand, does not appear until firms have migrated a large amount of their IT activities to the cloud and made well-informed decisions about cloud model/arrangement and cloud system management. When a corporation switches at least 60% of its systems to the cloud, it gains significant speed and capacity advantages. Anything below this criterion helps with defensive priorities, but it doesn’t help much more with getting a competitive advantage.

Cloud Computing Increase Profitability and business Growth

Cloud adoption is happening at different speeds and scales in different markets. Compared to other markets, European companies reported lower amounts of IT in the clouds. Companies predict they will heavily rely on the cloud to unlock new potential by 2022. Progressive and offensive cloud objectives, such as,- enabling remote access, cost management, resilience, and security, improved digital capabilities, accelerating deployment, and achieving scale seamlessly will be the dominant reasons for companies to adopt the cloud.

Sources:

Cloud Radar 2021: Boosting profits and enabling competitive edge through cloud

Effective methods to avoid Data loss and Data leakage

09 May 2022
by: Aisha Javed
in: BlogPost
Tags: #ArtificialIntelligence, #DATALOSSPREVENTION, #dataprotection, #DATASECURITY, #dlp, AI, BigData, Digitization
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In the age of digitization and technological developments such as Industry 4.0, companies are confronted with ever-increasing amounts of data that need to be stored, analyzed, and evaluated according to business activity/priorities. Even though data is playing an increasingly significant role as a resource, it also comes along with huge security challenges. It is becoming increasingly lucrative for hackers to steal data to use it for a competitive advantage or even to monetize stolen data. When the data is stolen, companies lose a lot of money. To counteract this, data security, i.e., the protection of data from unauthorized access, is of crucial importance.

The protection of a company’s valuable data from unauthorized access is the task of data loss prevention (DLP) tools. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions have been an integral part of the IT security strategy of many companies for more than ten years now. It is one of the most used technologies, by worldwide companies, to prevent the loss of sensitive data. The aim is to protect any form of data against manipulation, disclosure, loss, and other forms of threats.

Various countermeasures can be taken to minimize the loss of a company due to data loss & to protect critical business assets. When implementing them, it is important to know what value the respective data generates for the company. Data that leads to high financial losses in the event of damage must be given the highest priority in the implementation of data loss prevention.

Backups: The most used method to counteract data loss are backups. These do not directly prevent the data loss process, but if data is lost, it can at least be recovered. Thus, it is important that the backups are carried out on a regular basis. They must also be regularly checked for recoverability and malware.

Permission Restrictions: Another technique to limit accidental data loss by employees is to restrict permissions/access to valuable files. The permission layer supports the company’s data privacy by protecting access to restricted data. Also, if an employee does not have permission to delete a file cannot delete it either.

Training and antivirus programs: There are several measures that must be taken to protect against viruses. First, the employees should be trained so that a virus has no chance of being invited into the system. However, since errors can still occur here, network anti-virus programs must be installed on every computer, every server, and every communication interface. It makes sense not to rely on just one provider here to be able to intercept several viruses.

Data leakage prevention: Analogous to data loss prevention, data must be inventoried and categorized. It ensures that users do not send sensitive or critical information outside the corporate network. Business confidential and critical information is classified and protected so that unauthorized users cannot accidentally or maliciously share data, which would put the organization at risk.

E-mail scanning: To prevent unauthorized internal sending of confidential documents, companies can prevent outgoing e-mails with attachments. However, since this cannot be practically implemented in everyday life, it makes sense to scan outgoing e-mails and only deliver them if previously set rules for sending have been observed.

Training and antivirus programs: Finally, incoming electronic communication can also be checked. This is to ensure that no Trojan or other form of malicious software can nest in the corporate network. Incoming documents in particular offer opportunities for this. Anti-virus programs must be used here to prevent a virus from being loaded. Employees also need to be trained so that fraudulent e-mails don’t stand a chance.

Data loss prevention & data leakage prevention are two main data security strategies that are adopted by worldwide companies. Companies that store sensitive and critical data, such as personal data, should place a greater focus on data leakage prevention. Operators of universally available assets, on the other hand, should consider data loss prevention as a priority.

RPA: Why should you consider automation to achieve operational excellence

01 May 2022
by: Aisha Javed
in: BlogPost
Tags: #automationanywhere, #automationsolution, #digitaltransformation #rpa #digitalization #businessgrowth #automation #cloud #cloudcomputing #xorlogics
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reasons to start with RPA AUTOMATION

As we are moving towards rapid development, every business is becoming “intelligent” and constantly finding new ways to reinvent their products and services, amaze their customers, and increase profits. To survive in today’s competitive world, companies of all shapes and sizes are integrating automation into their infrastructure, some of them succeed while others fail. According to Forrester, European businesses will invest between €2.4 and €3.3 billion in automation to boost productivity, including in lower-wage sectors.

Higher production and increased productivity are the two biggest advantages commonly attributed to automation. Other benefits related to automation are eliminating or reducing risks of human error on manual data entry tasks to ensure consistent quality in data entry. As businesses today collect enormous amounts of data, automation software can easily track all insights hidden in large portions of, often unused, data.

To start with automation, businesses must ask themselves, what are the goals they want to achieve with automation? Which process do they need to automate? Do they have automation tools and experts? What skills do their staff need to work in an automated environment?

Here below is a checklist you need to know before adding automation into your ecosystem:

- Companies must know the goals that they want to achieve by implementing automation in their workflow. They can achieve their goals to make more profit, reduce overall operational costs or get the maximum work done in a minimum time, or efficiently utilize available resources and take appropriate strategic decisions. Once their goal and vision are clear, achieving results is easy and possible.

- Once the goal is clear, the automation of necessary tasks must be number one on the priority list. At this point, the time, budget and human resources must be well calculated respecting the business process, also these three are the main resources and assets that can be saved once the automation process is placed.

- Develop a roadmap that strategically focuses on investments that are needed to create a digital environment.

- According to the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) annual report 2019 by Everest Group, the global independent RPA independent software vendor market surpassed US$1 billion in 2018, with over two-thirds of the revenue coming from software licenses. It shows the availability of so many automation tools that makes it harder to select the right tool a company needs to accomplish its goals. Therefore, they must choose the one which is easy to install by their IT specialist without any extern or vendor support.

- Select and set up a team of employees that can implement smooth change management towards the digital workforce system instead of legacy software and create a continuous deployment plan.

- Train IT managers to recognize opportunities to build and adapt the automation software to their needs and establish a modern technology environment to support the rapid development and adaptation of innovative solutions.

- Companies that are newly introduced to automation tools/software, must keep in mind one of the most crucial factors for long-term survival, which are the running costs and licensing of tools, in addition to that make sure to opt for the tool that provides a smooth and secure data handling, as in automation processes, customer’s private or confidential information can be used.

- Choose the software that will scale along with your automation efforts and provide for a full-scale digital transformation.

- Pay attention to continuous improvement of critical business process planning and operations to develop a robust understanding of the business process and workflow and know what makes the processes tick and what doesn’t.

Once the automation strategy is placed, you can redeploy the human workforce to innovate and improve your business processes and deal with other priorities.

Sources :

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