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The New Cyber Protection Space = Data Protection + Cybersecurity

What Is Cyber Protection?

Cyber Protection is an IT industry solution category that merges the existing spaces of data protection and cybersecurity, with an objective of securing the safety and resiliency of application and business data, whether in flight or in storage, across hybrid cloud and distributed device environments against a globally connected attack surface.

Dev and Ops. Containers and Cloud Computing

Some things just go great together. We’re on the cusp of another great combination, as the tectonic forces of market dynamics and modern threats are fusing together two well-established information technology sectors: data protection and cybersecurity -- into a bigger, broader category of solutions for Cyber Protection.

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The Incident Review: 4 Incidents in Outer Space

Managing incidents like network outages and server failures is tough enough when they happen in a data center.

But when those failures occur in outer space, the challenges can become stratospheric. When you can’t rely on conventional monitoring and management tools, and even physical access is impossible, you need to think more creatively about incident management.

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How to Create a CRM System

CRM software has become a must-have tool for most businesses today. But some of the existing CRM solutions on the market just aren’t quite suitable for large businesses with complex needs.

That’s why so many large organizations and enterprises are choosing to build a custom CRM from scratch, in-house.

If you’re interested in building a one-of-a-kind CRM platform specifically for your company, this guide will walk you through the step-by-step process of doing so.

What to Expect When Creating a CRM System

Building a custom CRM system from scratch might sound a bit intimidating. But the entire process can be summarized in just five simple steps:

  1. Evaluate Your Options
  2. Assemble Your Development Team
  3. Define Your Goals
  4. Choose Your CRM Features
  5. Deploy and Maintain Your CRM System

The Good

The best part about creating a CRM system is that you have total control over the features and functionality.

Lots of ready-made CRM solutions integrate with popular business software. But they don’t always play nice with internal databases or other custom applications. So if your business has built custom apps in the past, you can set up your new CRM to integrate seamlessly with those systems.

Creating a CRM system allows you to scale without limitations. Other systems could restrict your growth or at least hinder your progress as you run into certain package restrictions.

Another positive aspect of creating your own CRM system is the cost. While the initial investment may be a bit higher, you won’t be locked into monthly or annual subscription fees that last indefinitely. This will ultimately save your company money in the long run.

For large organizations with an internal IT team, you can create a CRM system in-house without worrying about third parties, contract negotiations, or external support.

You’ll also have complete control over the design and layout of your CRM platform for all end-users in your company.

The Bad

Any time you’re building a new system from scratch, there will be challenges.

For starters, there’s the timeline. Ready-made CRM solutions can be deployed quickly since they’re already built. But a custom CRM system can take months to build, test, and ultimately deploy. Any mistakes or problems you run into will push back the delivery date (and likely add to your costs as well).

You’ll also have to manage all support for your CRM internally. If a sales rep or service agent has a problem, they can’t call an 800 number or live chat with a third-party support team. You’ll need to provide all troubleshooting, service desk requests, and training materials in-house.

All backend servers, databases, security, and other technical requirements must be maintained in-house as well. Your team will also be responsible for all updates of the system post-launch.

Step 1 – Evaluate Your Options

Only a small percentage of businesses actually have the means to support this type of custom CRM development. If you’re a small business or your company doesn’t have an in-house IT team, then this probably isn’t the best option for you.

Given that, I want to quickly cover a few alternative options for creating a CRM system before you dive into a custom development project on your own.

You may ultimately realize that you can skip a lot of these steps by buying a pre-built CRM system or outsourcing the project to a third-party development team.

Buying vs. Building

Why build when you can buy? There are hundreds of CRM platforms on the market today that are trusted by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide—including large-scale enterprises.

When you buy a CRM system, you can deploy your CRM strategy and start immediately instead of waiting several months.

These solutions come with tons of pre-built functionality, user-friendly tools, and they integrate with lots of popular third-party business software. Plus, you won’t have to worry about support or any backend maintenance. There are even custom enterprise solutions that allow you to customize modules and choose your own functions.

If you’re on the fence and want to see what else is out there, check out our list of the best CRM software to explore those alternative options.

Building vs. Outsourcing

If you don’t want to buy a pre-built system but you’re still not sure about building the CRM yourself, you might be tempted to outsource this project to a third-party development team.

This is not a path we recommend.

Entrusting your CRM system to an outsourced firm has lots of potential downsides. The cost will be higher, and most of these firms just use pre-built functions and pass them off as “custom” modules.

In some cases, development firms just white-label existing tools and put your company’s branding on the software to make it appear as though it’s customized.

Those providers might maintain your custom CRM on their own servers as well, forcing you to pay ongoing maintenance fees for the lifetime of your CRM.

So while there are definitely some reputable development firms out there, it’s in your best interest to handle this project in-house.

Step 2 – Assemble Your Development Team

For the remainder of this article, we’re going to assume that you’ve decided to build the CRM system internally, and that your organization has the personnel, budget, and technical requirements needed to support that custom development.

Now it’s time to put together the team that will do the system build. Depending on the size of your organization, the CRM creation process might be handled by the entire IT department or just a handful of select individuals.

Either way, don’t just haphazardly assign the task to your IT department and assume everything will go smoothly. This needs to be treated as a project of its own, and everyone on it needs to have a clear and predefined role in ensuring things go smoothly. This way, everyone will know their responsibilities, and there’s no confusion.

Project Manager

From the initial planning stages through the day-to-day operations, the project manager will keep the team on task to ensure deliverables are met on time and under budget.

PMs will work directly with executives in the company who have a vision of what the final CRM will ultimately look like. This might involve the CTO, CMO, or Director of Sales.

The PM has to create a project plan, map out an estimated timeline, plan all tasks, and identify final deliverables. Project managers will also be responsible for choosing a project management framework and methodology for managing the team.

Ideally, you’ll want to assign this role to someone on your team with experience and leadership skills, who has a firm grasp of both the business side and technical side of building custom software.

Developers

We won’t dive into the details of the different development methods and coding languages for building a CRM system. Some of you might be building a web-based system, while others may go with something native, hybrid, or mobile, so you’ll simply want developers with expertise in whatever code you plan on using.

Regardless of your development method, the developers will be the workhorses of the operation. They’ll be writing the code required to actually build and support the CRM system.

Based on the timeline and deliverables set by the project manager, the developers will likely be completing tasks on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis.

UX/UI Designers

Your designers will determine how the CRM system is laid out. They’ll be responsible for creating the initial wireframes and passing recommendations along to the developers.

Designers will also decide how the user dashboards look, where certain menu navigations will lead to, how different pages connect to each other, and so on.

The entire look and feel of your CRM system will be based on the designer’s prototypes and mockups. It’s not uncommon for designers to use other CRM systems on the market as inspiration for how the solution will look at the end, so designers familiar with the market will be helpful here.

Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers and Testers

Developers write bugs in their code—it happens. It’s the job of QAs and testers to catch these mistakes and test the usability of your CRM system before you deploy it at scale company-wide.

Ideally, you’ll be doing this on an ongoing basis as different parts of the system get built. This will ultimately reduce everyone’s burden compared to waiting until the final system is finished.

It’s better to have your testers find the bugs early as opposed to your sales reps encountering problems when they’re inputting customer information or working leads through the sales funnel at scale.

Don’t overlook the importance of testing your CRM system–make sure to assign QA staff to the development team.

Step 3 – Define Your Goals

The possibilities of a custom CRM are virtually limitless. To avoid getting off-track, it’s important to identify your goals from the beginning. This will help you figure out the difference between your must-have features and nice-to-have features.

Remember, you can always expand the functionality of your system down the road. But for the initial development, start by prioritizing your goals.

Examples of CRM goals include:

  • Managing leads
  • Improving customer data governance within a single system
  • Increasing customer service KPIs like NPS
  • Maximize ROI of marketing campaigns
  • Close more leads
  • Increase revenue and customer LTV
  • Generate reports related to sales and marketing
  • Get detailed analytics related to customer behavior
  • Optimize your sales process
  • Reduce customer churn rates

Again, these will vary depending on your business type and industry. But don’t try to do all of them, especially not right away. Focus on roughly three to five main goals and start from there.

Step 4 – Choose Your CRM Features

Now it’s time to define and implement the custom features you want to build. These features will be directly related to the goals that you’ve defined in the previous step.

Examples of custom CRM system features include:

  • Contact management system
  • Lead management dashboard
  • Task management (calls, meetings, follow-ups, deadlines, etc.)
  • Sales pipeline view
  • Custom dashboards and reports
  • Mobile access
  • Integrations with third-party systems and internal databases
  • Integrations with custom internal apps
  • Referral tracking
  • Sales forecasting
  • Lead scoring
  • Invoicing, proposals, and e-sign

If you’re stuck and not sure what features to prioritize, try a demo free trial of an existing CRM platform. This will give you some inspiration on which features matter the most.

Step 5 – Deploy and Maintain Your CRM System

Once the system has been developed and tested, it’s time to deploy it. Depending on the size of your organization, you might choose to deploy the system in phases.

For example, you might only start with one department or team and scale from there to avoid potential problems with switching solutions too rapidly. This will give you a better idea of the learning curve and support required to maintain the system when it’s deployed company-wide.

Define User Roles and Onboard Your Staff

Start by defining the different user roles, access levels, and permissions for the end-users.

Your sales reps might have different access levels than marketing teams or support representatives. For example, a marketing user shouldn’t have the ability to send proposals or quotes to a customer in the sales pipeline—that’s for sales teams only.

The system should include some administrative roles for managers and executives as well. For example, managers should have access to a full overview of everyone’s performance, while individual sales staff should only have access to their own performance evaluations.

Employee Training

Once onboard, you need to make sure your staff is trained to use the software properly. It’s a good idea to have the IT team put together some training videos, how-to articles, and other guidance resources for the team.

You might also do some live training sessions in the early stages of deployment.

The more training resources you have, the smoother your transition will be. But don’t let this hold you back from going live. Over time, you can continue adding new tutorials and articles to your internal knowledge base.

Just make sure all of the basics are covered during the initial deployment and training.

Import Customer Data

For those of you who are currently using another CRM or database, you need to import that data into your custom CRM system.

This process will look a bit different for everyone. But don’t think that you need to start from scratch just because you’re building a new system.

All of your old customer data is still valuable and should be used moving forward.

Ongoing Support and Maintenance

In addition to the initial training, you’ll also need to have IT teams available for internal support.

What happens if an employee has a question or runs into a problem two months after you deploy? It’s crucial to have a system in place for these types of occurrences.

You’ll also need to maintain all servers, databases, and software on the backend. This includes security, patching, and updates.

Creating a CRM system is an ongoing process. There’s only so much knowledge you can get from a handful of testers and QAs. But once your team has full access to the software, you’ll really be able to identify areas for improvement.

You can also continue adding new features as you scale the CRM process for your business.

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How to Integrate Project Management Into Slack

Slack has quickly become one of the most popular business communication platforms on the planet. Trusted by 750,000+ companies across every industry, this live chat, voice, and video conferencing tool is a fast and simple way for teams to communicate.

In fact, the company unintentionally turned into a verb. It’s not uncommon for people around the office to say something like “Slack me later,” or just “Slack me,” to their co-workers.

But Slack is not a project management solution out-of-the-box. However, it can be used to extend the functionality of a project management tool to improve the way teams collaborate.

Integrating your project management software with Slack limits the amount of time you need to spend going back and forth between each platform. Slack can automatically notify you about task assignments, deadline reminders, and more. You can even mark tasks as complete within Slack.

Ready to take your project management process to the next level? This guide will teach you how.

What to Expect When Integrating Project Management Into Slack

Here’s a brief overview of the step-by-step process for integrating Slack with your project management software:

  1. Sign Up For Slack
  2. Verify Your Project Management Compatibility With Slack
  3. Install Your Project Management App in Slack
  4. Manage Your Projects and Teams With Slack Channels
  5. Explore Slack’s Capabilities For Project Management

The Good

There’s a good chance that you won’t have to switch project management solutions to get started. Slack integrates with all of the best project management software on the market today. So for those of you who are already comfortable with a certain tool, you probably won’t have to re-train your team to use another solution.

The integration process itself is really simple. There isn’t any coding required, and non-technical users can complete the integration with just a few clicks—no need to hire a developer or get your IT department involved with this process.

Once the integration is complete, your team won’t have to spend as much time in the project management platform. For many companies, the Slack dashboard is open during all working hours. Teams are used to having Slack messages appear in the background of whatever they’re working on, so they can quickly contribute to time-sensitive communications.

But having to keep your project management dashboard open at all times can clutter your desktop and slow down your productivity. The Slack integration eliminates this need. All of the project management notifications will go directly to Slack instead. So your team can view and respond to these notifications in the platform that they’re already using. This capability is perfect for teams who are already familiar with Slack but new to the idea of working with project management software.

Aside from the PM software integration, Slack has other capabilities that are perfect for project management as well. You can create different channels for teams, projects, updates, and more. This is an easy way to keep everyone organized and ensure all of your messages are going to the right people.

Slack works for team file sharing and collaboration too. In addition to project management software, Slack integrates with file management services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and more.

You can use Slack to automate workflows for complete customization as well. For project teams and project managers alike, integrating project management into Slack will benefit everyone.

The Bad

Slack is not a replacement for standalone project management tools. It doesn’t come with Gantt charts, Kanban boards, resource management tools, project management reports, time-tracking tools, and everything else you need to manage a project effectively.

Integrating Slack with project management doesn’t eliminate the need to use your project management software. It just extends the functionality of each solution to better accommodate your needs.

The Slack notifications and messages for project management will only be as good as the software you’re using. Everything still needs to be configured within that tool before you can get the most out of Slack. So if things aren’t organized in your project management dashboard, Slack won’t magically correct them.

The main benefit of integrating Slack with project management is that you won’t have to constantly bounce back and forth between two dashboards—this is unproductive. But you can’t just close your PM dashboard and never open it again.

Slack does have a free version, but that plan limits your integrations. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you upgrade to a paid version of Slack to avoid any problems here.

It’s also worth noting that by integrating project management into Slack, your team will be getting more notifications than usual. This can cause productivity problems for people who can’t effectively manage their notifications. Some team members might find the extra messages disruptive. But simply changing your notification preferences can eliminate this issue.

Like any new initiative, there will always be a learning curve. Some team members might have some pushback because they’re hesitant to change. As a project manager, you must be able to deal with this feedback properly to ensure your team embraces the change.

Step 1 – Sign Up For Slack

Obviously, you need to have a Slack account to integrate your project management solution with this tool. So if you haven’t already signed up for Slack, this will be your first step.

For those of you who already have a Slack account, don’t skip this step just yet. You should upgrade to a paid plan to avoid any issues with the integration. Slack does a free plan, but the integrations are limited. In general, the free plan isn’t a great option for business use anyways, so this upgrade is likely long overdue if you’re using Slack to collaborate with project teams.

Here’s a brief overview of the plans and packages to choose from:

I’ll describe each of these in greater detail below.

Standard

Slack’s Standard plan will be the best option for the vast majority of teams. The package supports an unlimited number of apps and integrations, so you can integrate Slack with your project management tool without any issues or restrictions.

You’ll have access to your entire message history, and the plan comes with 10 GB of storage per user. The Standard plan allows you to work securely with other teams via Slack Connect. It supports OAuth with Google, Two-factor authentication, and custom retention policies for all files and messages.

The plan comes with other great features like custom user groups for teams and departments and the ability to organize channels, messages, and apps into collapsible sections. These benefits are extremely useful for project management integration.

Slack Standard offers priority customer support as well, so it’s definitely worth the upgrade from a free plan.

Plus

Slack Plus is built for larger organizations or anyone business that needs advanced administrative capabilities. If you’re a project portfolio manager, you could benefit from this package.

The plan comes with double the amount of storage per user as the Standard plan and also offers SAML-based SSO (single sign-on). Slack Plus offers user provisioning, real-time active directory sync, and the ability to manage posting permissions for any channel.

You’ll also benefit from a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Enterprise Grid

The Enterprise Grid package is designed for large businesses or organizations that need to accommodate strict industry regulations. For example, if you’re managing a project in the medical industry, you’d need Enterprise Grid for HIPAA-compliant collaboration.

You’ll benefit from EMM (enterprise mobility management) integrations, an audit log API, and the ability to manage compliance, security, and billing from a single view.

All Enterprise Grid customers have a designed account success team for the ultimate experience in customer service. If you’re interested in this package, you’ll need to contact the Slack sales team for a custom quote.

Step 2 – Verify Your Project Management Compatibility With Slack

Once you’ve signed up, you need to make sure that your project management software can integrate with Slack. If you don’t see your software on the list, there are a few workarounds. You could potentially use a third-party tool like Zapier to connect Slack with your project management software.

But most of you shouldn’t have to worry about this. If your project management software doesn’t connect with Slack, you might want to explore alternative solutions. Check out our list of the best project management software on the market today to see our top recommendations.

Here’s how to search for your PM software in Slack:

Navigate to the Integrations Page

From the Slack home page, find Integrations under the Product menu at the top of the screen.

This page will give you more information about connecting the tools you’re already using with Slack. It’s helpful to review this content if you’re unclear about how the integration works or if you have any other questions.

When you’re ready to proceed, scroll until you see an option for the Slack App Directory.

Slack integrates with 2,400+ apps. This number continues to grow on what feels like a daily basis. In addition to project management software, you’ll be able to connect other third-party business apps to Slack from this page as well.

Search For Your Project Management Software

There are a few different ways to find your preferred project management software in the app directory. For those of you who are already using a particular tool, the easiest way would be the search bar at the top of the page.

If you’re not currently using a project management tool and you want to see what Slack has to offer, you can browse through the project management integrations by category as well.

Navigate to the Categories menu on the left side of the screen. Then click on Project Management.

Now you can browse through the countless options like Trello, Asana, Jira, Teamwork, Zoho Project, and more.

Step 3 – Install Your Project Management App in Slack

Regardless of how you navigated through the Slack App Directory, simply click on your project management software when you find it.

Next, click Add to Slack on the left side of the screen for the software you’ve selected.

For this example, I’m using Zoho Projects. It’s one of our top recommendations in the project management software space and versatile enough to accommodate any type of project.

This step will look the same for whatever tool you’re using. It’s just a matter of finding that tool and clicking Add to Slack.

Sign-in to Your Project Management Software Account

Slack will automatically prompt you to sign in to your PM account to complete the installation. Here’s what that page looks like for Zoho Projects:

The screen will look slightly different depending on the software you’re using, but the same concept holds true across the board.

Once you’ve signed in, you’ll need to just Allow Slack to integrate with your PM tool. This will complete the initial installation process.

Step 4 – Manage Your Projects and Teams With Slack Channels

To use Slack effectively for project management, you should set up different channels for each team and project. Depending on the nature of your project, you can set channels to public or private.

Slack channels will ultimately act as the primary communication method for your project team. So it’s important to segment things accordingly. This will also make it easier when you’re setting up the notifications in Slack from your project management software.

Here’s an example of what project management notifications could look like within a Slack channel:

Keeping your Slack account organized will be crucial to project management success. Otherwise, too much clutter and noise could backfire with what you’re trying to accomplish.

Step 5 – Explore Slack’s Capabilities For Project Management

By now, you’re already up and running with Slack for project management. But to truly get the most out of this extended capability, you need to have a firm grasp of your options.

In terms of project management functionality, here are a few possibilities for you to consider:

  • Automate the process of creating a new task directly in Slack
  • Schedule action items in your project management software from Slack
  • Improve your project management oversight by setting up status updates and deadline reminders
  • Allow team members to collaborate on tasks, files, or other shared documents

For advanced functionality, you can use Slack’s workflow builder to automate mundane processes. This is a no-code workflow builder, and can it’s an easy way to automate tasks between your project management software and Slack.

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Identity Management Day: Cause for Celebration or Concern?

Tuesday, April 13 marks Identity Management Day — a time to bring awareness to business leaders, IT decision-makers, and others about the importance of managing and securing digital identities. It’s a nice concept: businesses coming together to share best practices, vendors supporting the cause, and an overall push for better security hygiene. But is there actually a reason to celebrate?

Securing your network is a journey, not a destination. Not just on one day, but every day. As such, identity management (IM) shouldn’t be celebrated as a singular component of security, but rather a capability that should be ingrained in the data governance fabric of every organization. With the ability to safeguard information, facilitate compliance, and streamline work processes, it's hard to believe that it’s not already.

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IT talent: The Most important Skill To Develop in 2021 Is DevOps

We may not want to admit this but many of us (myself included) are guilty of not doing something important unless we’re forced to do it. We push off those health goals until we get an unusual test result from the doctor or finally head to the dentist when our molar aches. In the same vein, like we want to keep our bodies healthy, business leaders have the same goal of keeping their business evolving as time progresses, with the help of digital transformation. Yet, before COVID, some digital transformation strategies were reserved for the backburner or moonshots.

Up until this year, the world hasn’t changed the way we work in this magnitude, forcing us to work in a dominantly remote way. The inability to travel and lack of physical access to people has pushed us to embrace the digital methods we knew we had to have in our arsenal for the past decade. 

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Incident Management in 2021: From Basics to Best Practices

Covering the Basics

What Is Incident Management?

Incident management is the process used by developer and IT operations teams to respond to system failures (incidents) and restore normal service operation as quickly as possible.

What Is an Incident?

Incident is a broad term describing any event that causes either a complete disruption or a decrease in the quality of a given service. Incidents usually require immediate response of the development or operations team, often referred to as on-call or response teams in incident management.

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An Approach to Cloud Transformation and Cloud Migration

Overview

The ongoing COVID 19 pandemic is creating new challenges to almost all industries. It is causing a significant impact on business and operating models. Organizations are rethinking, "how to make business resilient for such large disruptions," " how to innovate faster and enable new business services to customers," "how to reduce TCO," and "how to enable better connectivity and collaborations." Such challenges existed before the pandemic era as well, but have become more relevant and important now.

Businesses that have already embarked on their cloud journey have shown greater resiliency and responsiveness to this pandemic. In the near future, it's expected that cloud adoption will significantly increase across industries with a combination of different cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) along with hybrid and multi-cloud topologies. Cloud hosting will become a new essential IT service for businesses.

A well-defined approach for cloud transformation is expected to realize business goals, cost savings, and strategic benefits. This article will briefly outline the elements of a typical approach for application cloud migration, modernization, and transformation. The article combines portfolio rationalization methods that can identify potential savings by reducing spending on non-valuable portfolios, along with cloud migration methods to realize the benefits of the cloud. This article will explain the methodical approach to a successful cloud transformation.

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Why Do Data Integration Projects Fail?

You’ve heard it before. '70% of all data integration projects fail.' But ask yourself this: Why are you surprised?

A simple glance at the Standish CHAOS reports from 2009 to 2015 tell us that only around 30% of any kind of IT projects are considered successful. Why do we imagine that data integration would be any different?

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5 NLP Trends to Watch in 2021

Although still in its infancy, 2020 has been a year of significant growth for Natural Language Processing (NLP). In fact, research from Gradient Flow found that even in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, 53% of technical leaders indicated their NLP budget was at least 10% higher compared to 2019, with 31% stating their budget was at least 30% higher than the previous year. This is quite significant, given most companies are experiencing a downturn in IT budgets, as companies adjusted their spending in response to the pandemic. 

With the power to help streamline and even automate tasks across industries, from finance and healthcare to retail and sales, leaders are just beginning to reap the benefits of NLP. As the technology advances further and its value becomes more widely known, NLP can achieve outcomes from handling customer service queries to more mission-critical tasks, like detecting and preventing adverse drug events in a clinical setting. As NLP continues on its growth trajectory, here are some of the top trends to watch in 2021. 

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Strengthen Enterprise Security Through Network Isolation Approach

IT security managers are increasingly waking up to realize that the sheer quantity of regular generated malicious and non-malicious software programmers requires them to be on their toes, searching for effective countermeasures. They are largely moving to network segmentation/isolation to ensure security, sensing the failure of traditional security approaches.

Corporate IT security managers are rapidly waking up to realize that the sheer volume of malicious and non-malicious software programs that are generated daily requires them to be on their toes, looking for effective countermeasures. Sensing the failure of conventional security approaches, they are largely shifting to network segmentation/ isolation for ensuring security.

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Kyverno for Kubernetes

In their recent report Container Adoption In the Enterprise, Forrester found that 86% of IT leaders are prioritizing increasing container usage for developer agility and improved collaboration between IT operations teams and developers. However,  the report also states:

Companies using container management platforms struggle with compliance (meeting industry regulations and enforcing policies) and portability (building and deploying across multiple cloud environments).

Let's explore why Kubernetes configuration management can be perceived as complex and then discuss a Kubernetes native solution to address this complexity.

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How Machine Learning Is Reshaping the Customer Experience

Machine Learning is under rapid evolution and is one of the blockbusting technologies. Most sectors such as healthcare, finance, travel, and transportation, social media, e-commerce, marketing, IT, gaming, media, robotics, manufacturing are experimenting with it to take it to the horizon and are expected to expedite its functioning faster than ever. Certainly, it bestows extensive cognizance of the customers and their requirements.

So, What Is Machine Learning?

To be technical, machine learning is the subset of Artificial Intelligence and the study of computer algorithms to find patterns from the huge data to make future predictions. While referring to the business firms, future outcomes such as risk assessment, customer’s behavior can be derived from the patterns observed and the response can be given accordingly.

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DaniWeb Techie Meetup – Last Tues of the Months?

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This meetup group was started by the founder of the DaniWeb.com IT Discussion Community who was getting frustrated that all of the meetups she was interested in attending were based in NYC, and it was nearly impossible to get to them on weeknights for people who work out on Long Island.

Join a group of people who work in the tech industry throughout Long Island.

We are a very informal group consisting mostly of web developers and IT consultants, with the occasional application developer thrown into the mix. We talk about the latest projects we're working on and get help and feedback from each other.

The meetup starts at 6 pm but running as late as 10 or 11 pm (sometimes even later!) is the norm. People typically arrive anytime between 6 pm and 9 pm, so don't miss out just because you can't get there by 6. There's usually an early crowd and a late crowd.

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Endpoint Management and Security In a Work-From-Home World

Network administrators have long been stretched thin in their attempts to maintain global endpoint security settings, configurations, and patching. Now that most, if not all, of their organization’s employees are connecting remotely, the job has become even more difficult.

Once end-users move beyond the relative safety of their office buildings, they’re essentially out in the wild. They might be using their own devices rather than standard-issue machines to connect to the corporate network, and conforming to IT policies is probably not their highest priority right now. Perhaps their kids are playing on their devices, or maybe they are surfing the net in their downtime, taking corporate-maintained endpoints to new, potentially dangerous sites. And these are just some of the new complications IT administrators face on the end-user side. It becomes even more complex when you consider the implications of widespread remote connectivity on network performance.

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The Low-Code and No-Code Movement Can Transform Your Startup Into Category Leaders

No-code and low-code technologies have been making inroads for years but have never quite delivered on their promise as reliable alternatives to traditional software development for complex, business-critical applications. Then COVID-19 forced a new, expedited timeline for moving analog in-person processes to semi- or fully-automated online ones. At the same time, IT and engineering roadmaps have been thrown out the window as technical teams scramble to adjust to new distributed working conditions while juggling multiple "hair on fire" problems. As a result, operations and business teams have been left with urgent needs for new business applications and scant developer resources, creating the perfect storm for no- or low-code solutions to emerge as the savior of productivity. But decision-makers should be wary of treating these platforms as a panacea to avoid costly failures and lost time.

What Are No-Code and Low-Code Technologies?

To understand how no- and low-code solutions fill the gap between business demand for development and supply of technical resources, it is helpful to understand what those terms mean exactly. No-code platforms allow people with no technical knowledge to stand up complex, cloud-based business applications using simple, drag-and-drop tooling. Relatedly, low-code platforms are also based on the concept of abstraction through pre-built software building blocks oriented towards accelerating time to development by reducing the amount of “original” code that needs to be written in any given application. Perhaps because of their shared DNA, there is a trend towards convergence; as no-code platforms become more powerful and versatile with add-ons and application marketplaces, and low-code platforms build features to require less coding. Given this trend, we can collectively refer to these platforms as Low-code Development Platforms.