Cloud Computing

In an era of rapidly evolving technology witnessing a range of innovations every passing day, cloud computing has emerged as a trendy technology option enabling continued network access between shared computing resources. By requiring only minimum amount of interaction between the user organization and the service provider, cloud computing offers flexibility and scalability to the user’s business operations.

Mobile device today, as advanced as our erstwhile desktop computers, play a crucial role in cloud computing concept as it provides manageable and convenient access to numerous forms of data and corporate applications. By enabling access to data from remote and obscure locations using their mobile devices, cloud computing facilitates the users to use various distinctive services such as multimedia, web browsing, email communication easily.  

Despite its widely known constraints related to storage, battery life and processing power, mobile cloud computing has been gathering rapid pace in the recent years. By handling massive data storages, mobile cloud computing has made it possible to execute intensive computing functions through mobile devices. This is beneficial to numerous mobile development communities as it makes it possible for them to develop mobile projects having short lifecycles.  

Through mobile cloud computing, devices and tablets can be used for various purposes such as payment gateways, hosting services, application monitoring and development and web analytics. By radically transforming the way enterprises manage, utilise and operate IT resources, mobile cloud computing has become a paradigm of greater efficiency, agility and business scalability. By playing a pivotal role in the business model of enterprises by building an elastic data center, cloud computing has brought enormous value additions to the business oriented scenarios.

outsourcing IT support

Whether to have an in-house IT support or to farm it out is indeed a difficult decision for any business. In this post, we shall enlighten you with some knowledge that will certainly clear off the obscurity around the subject to facilitate decision making.

Maximising profits by reducing costs:

An in-house IT expert will cost a business anything between 30 – 40 thousand pounds per annum, besides expenditure on his recruitment, additional benefits as well as regular trainings for enhancing IT based skills. In addition, smaller businesses cannot afford periods of downtime and precious staff time spent on issues which they do not fully understand, leading to loss of productivity.

Outsourcing IT support helps a business reduce its costs drastically as they need to make only a fixed consolidated monthly payment as per the contract allowing them to operate within a set budget.

Expertise available at all times:

Today, every business is heavily dependent on IT systems. However, the need of expertise in technology may trough and peak. Yours is a small business and you probably do not have enough space to accommodate a staff. Moreover, in case of an IT emergency, if you do not have an expert at hand, you might have to resort to costlier measures for restoring business operations.

In an outsourced model, you can easily reach out to a dedicated technician as often as you like. These experts not only monitor your systems but also fix issues you encounter.

Complement during crisis:

Sure, you have an in-house expert supervising your IT desk on whom you rely for the stability of IT systems and continuity of business operations. Imagine a critical failure occurs and this expert staff member is occupied in another meeting, on a holiday or simply fallen ill? Besides, what if there are multiple crises at the same time?

If you consider sub-contracting your IT support, you always have a team of experts on call that are never off sick or take any holidays. They skillfully resolve your IT related woes and complement your internal team of experts.

Challenges in recruiting experts:   

Employing the wrong person is one of the costliest mistakes that could damage a business. If you are not from a technical background, how do you ensure that you are employing the right person for a work as critical as support for IT systems? Recruitment is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive process especially if you are at the risk of getting swindled into incomprehensible technical jargon.

With an external IT support team, you don’t have to worry. You will have a lineup of highly trained IT specialists equipped with the latest industry qualifications, most up-to-date technical knowledge and skill sets to resolve your issues on a simple call.

Core business remains your focus:

The heart of any business is its customers and staff wellbeing. The last thing you would want is to get vexed about IT issues and deal with the anxiety of fixing them. If you think that distributing IT responsibilities among your staff internally is a cost saver for your business, then you need to revisit your decision. Chances are that your employees are constantly distracted with issues they do not completely understand, leading to loss in focus and dramatically reducing their productivity in their primary job role.

Outsourced IT support not only speedens problem resolution, it gives you complete peace of mind, takes away the stress of managing your technology needs and allows you to focus on running your core business.

Keeping up with changing times:

Technology is transforming at an express pace and being in harmony with the changing IT landscape is of paramount importance for any business. How do you find out if there is an advanced IT product in the market, a particular software upgrade or application that may benefit your current business operations?

Using outsourced IT support will give your business, an access to a range of partnerships and accreditations with leading technology providers in the industry. Your sub-contractor can gain advanced intelligence and training on the latest technological developments and solutions that will help perk up your business.

Quick Access to additional services:  

Concerned about your business continuity? Require a disaster recovery plan? Wish to support an increasingly mobile workforce? Want to trim down on print and telecommunication expenses? Design the Information Security Policy? Set up a new telephone system?

Your outsourced IT support provider will have answers to all your questions. With extensive knowledge and experience in a large cross-section of IT specialisms, your external support team will assist you with all additional services required to run a business efficiently.

Having an in-house IT desk means your systems are on ‘break-fix’ plan; by the time you know there is a problem, your staff productivity has already diminished and extended periods of system downtime proves costly. Whereas, your IT service provider proactively monitors your systems 24 X 7, all days of the year. Problems can be identified and rectified even before they affect your business almost eliminating any downtime ensuring that your IT systems are on hand whenever you need them.

Now, if you have made up your mind and feel that outsourcing IT support services will be a cost-effective move for your business, contact us immediately. Our subject matter experts will be glad to help you!

Google

Recently, Google announced its two new initiatives in company statement; Cloud Services and Google Apps and it is expected that these tow services aims to help the start-ups and enterprises by fueling its momentum in India.  Google will cover the fees of Google Apps, if any company or business will be locked into an EA (Enterprise Agreement) with another provider till the end of contract. Apart from that Google will also add some of the deployment cost with an aim to help the companies in their success with any one of the Google for Work Partners. Once Enterprise Agreement will up, Google will provide a simple contract without any additional traps. According to experts, it will help the business with basic enterprise agreements and apart from that there will be no dependencies to unlock the savings of up to 70 percent by switching works to Google Apps. This tech major also announced its plan to provide the help of $20,000 in 1,000 Indian start-ups as free credits for Google Cloud services, which will be start from year 2016,it is expected that this Google Cloud Platform will bring new zeal and power in Indian start-up communities because still there are many Indian start-ups which are held back due to lack of computing power or build and deploy scale capability to become next big innovation in cyber space. At the launch ceremony of these initiatives Amit Singh¸ President of Google For Work, stated that “India have the second largest developer population and this country is poised to be the home of next generation start-ups and global software firms. As a world’s leading tech giant we are committed to help these next gen companies and enterprises as a trusted and affordable cloud computing tools service provider to help them succeed”. He more he added that “In past few years, we have gained tremendous momentum while helping the start-ups and new business organizations and at this point of time we are pretty much confident with these new initiatives. At this point of time we are trying to bring down the barriers for companies and start-ups to make the switch to Google Apps”. In present, Google is powering up the IT and Cloud Computing in range of Indian companies such as; Indian-born multinationals; Hero MotoCorp and Bombay Dyeing and Welspun Group. According to Mohit Pande, Country Head of Google for Work India, “We are excited to work on this new initiative and to work with our current and soon-to-be customers, however; with the EA we will offer Cloud Platform credits for startups with an aim to start new chapter in success of Indian start-ups”.

Microsoft

Recently, Microsoft announced its major updates for its DevOps tools and its services at the Connect Conference in New York. These updates will range from new free program for developers to new subscription service in the marketplace of updates to .NET, extensions and the renaming of Visual Studio Online. This is one the major dev tools update at Microsoft its developer S. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, Head of Developer Division left the company, however; currently Julia Liuson is the Head of Developer Division. According to Liuson, “There are few more updates because overall theme is that Microsoft wants to make sure that it has great offerings for those developers who want to build code”.

To help the developers, company announced both free as well as paid Visual Studio Dev Essentials Program, which bundles most of the Microsoft’s free tools and services in single package (with the addition of free Azure credits next year). As a part of Dev Essentials Program, all developers will get access to the Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Code and training services from a number of partners including; Xamarin, Pluralsight and Wintellect.  Howevver; there is little controversy about free program of Microsoft, but it is expected that there will be some discussion regarding Microsoft’s decision to start Monthly and Annual Subscriptions for Visual Studio’s Enterprise and Professional Editions. As per the statement of Liuson, “The idea behind this concept is to provide an opportunity to freelancers, consultants and others developers to access the development environment because they don’t need long-term commitment. Microsoft will continue to sell its perpetual licenses for Visual Studio, but many are wondering that this isn’t just a first step and company’s overall plan is completely different for Visual Studio subscription model.

Pricing and Subscriptions:

In present, pricing for Visual Studio Professional is $45/month (or $539/year) and for Enterprise edition it will be $250/month (or $2,999/year), however; the annual plans will include monthly Azure credits as well as access to dev/test software.

One of the first extensions to be featured in the Marketplace is Hockey App, which is for mobile beta testing and crash analytics service. Apart from that Microsoft is also introducing a free tier which will be the developers to manage up to two apps. These subscriptions will be available in the newly launched Visual Studio Marketplace and this marketplace is now in the preview to become main hub to get access for both free and paid Visual Studio extensions from third-party vendors to Microsoft.

“Update 1”:

However; in the same conference Microsoft also announced the next update for Visual Studio 2015 named as “Update 1” will get launch on November 30 with other additional tools for building a pull requests hub, Universal Windows app, support for TypeScript 1.7 and ability to debug Java source code in the IDE.

Apart from tat company is also planning to launch its few more updates for Team Services, which will include IntelliJ support and a task-based Build service to improve dashboards for tracking a team’s progress. Other new tools and features are; Microsoft’s Android emulator for Mac OS X and beta of its free Visual Studio Code text editor for different platforms such as; Windows, Mac and Linux. Apart from updates and tools, company also announced new stats to show the momentum of growth, as Visual Studio 2015 has been downloaded for five million times, Visual Studio Online has 3.6 million registered users and the Visual Studio Code editor has been downloaded for more than one million times.

Liuson added that work culture at Microsoft has changed and now company want to be open by design and for that company is given opportunity to developers to target other platforms as well. The free Visual Studio Code editor for Windows, Linux and Mac and Microsoft’s Android emulator is great example.

Image credits : freom fotolia

May be you are doing it wrong again and again because most of the software developers have never seen successful software projects, as per the statement of Dave Farley, a delivery evangelist. The more he added that may be they have built their careers on doing the wrong things.

Dave Farley, at Mannheim, while kicking off the CLC (Continuous Lifecycle Conference) stated that research after research had shown that even small software development projects can get big success. In one of the study, which was done by McKinsey and Oxford University on more than 5,400 software projects, showed that more than 17 per cent software projects were so catastrophically bad and they have threatened the existence of the company. With these kinds of statics, Dave Farley argued that individuals can easily spend their whole career in software development industry without even encountering an unequivocally successful software development projects. The more he added that according to me, “The maximum software developers have spent the maximum percentage of their careers not even knowing that what they are doing, what will be end project and how a successful software project looks like”.

Dave Farley traced a sorry state in software development projects and its practices which is based on the misreading fundamental of the 1970s Winston Royce paper as it considered the waterfall projects with an aims to shaped the traditional software development practices. This paper is description of what to do or not to do while working on software projects. But Dave Farley’s papers had gone into argument for feedback and testing and do the best possible job twice if possible. Royce was arguing in 1970s iterative development and Farley stated that we have a situation in present time where we prefer to take entirely ad hoc approach for software development which can leads towards the successful outcomes in comparison of previous traditional waterfall approaches. With an aim to improve the chances of producing a successful outcome, Farley advised that his audience should automate different stages of software projects such as; software testing, configuration management, pilot testing and slash cycle times.

Machine Learning API by Microsoft

Recently, Microsoft opens machine learning API to detect the mood of person ie. Person is happy or sad? Now, Oxford API, awing of Microsoft Research is planning to put this artificial intelligence in app to pass on its benefit to consumers in free. Chris Bishop, lead at Microsoft Research and esteemed scientist launch a set of free machine learning APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces), which is able to tell that person is happy or sad.

Chris Bishop, Head laboratist at Microsoft Research in Cambridge revealed that business organizations and individual developers can get their hands on certain tools which are based on Microsoft products with an aim to bring Artificial Intelligence such as; vision, language understanding and speech recognition into their apps. Before a decade ago, software company Microsoft boost the resurgence of machine learning which have root in academics and now it’s making a comeback as advertising on social networks to indentify the potential users and their personalize experiences with products. Chris Bishop is a renowned AI researcher and he stated that machine learning can change the life of humans within 50 years, apart from that fact that till now research has only unlocked only about 2 percent of its potential.

It is expected that soon Microsoft will release public beta versions of several other tools by the end of 2015, and it will also include video; that is able to automatically edit the video though  detecting motion, stabilizing shaky video, tracking faces as seen in the Microsoft Hyperlapse. However; apart from that Speaker recognition will be also available in free by the end of year and it will allow the developers to learn intricacies of an individual’s voice. It can help to develop advance security tools and gadgets, Microsoft said. For more information on APIs you can visit Microsoft Project Oxford website.

Online_accounts_safety

In present if you are person who is spending more than three hours online, so definitely you will fed up with so many online accounts and different passwords. No wonder, its good opportunity for those software’s and apps who are providing password storage service. But these passwords managers are not less than gaming tool for hackers as they can easily access them. If hackers will get your master password, so they will have an opportunity to access your all accounts. However; recently, LastPass, which is one of the premium password service manager detected suspicious activity last month. Here are some tips to avoid these issues;

All accounts are not equal and easy to crack:

Instead of remembering dozens passwords, maybe there is way to remember only half-dozen. Focus on only those accounts which are important.

Always remember the passwords and details of Bank accounts, credit card information for shopping services and never forget to remember the email info. E-mail accounts are very important, because after losing the passwords with e-mail you can reset the passwords on other services such as; social media, shopping sites and more. Try to remember the information for social media accounts because you need to use them regularly however; you can avoid the discussion forums information because they have less important. May be you will not mid if someone will post on behalf of you in discussion forums, but if someone will do it on your social media platform, so it can make harm for you in professional or personal life. Try to prioritize online accounts.

For highly sensitive accounts, use unique password and remember then or keep it on the hard copy and place that paper on safe place. Never use auto-generated or electronically generated passwords.

Lower priority:

For rest of the accounts which are not important for them you can use password manager, but in certain cases it could not necessary.

Web browsers of Apple and Google have in-built mechanisms to store the passwords for different accounts and they also update your passwords when you update your password on those sites. Even you have to sync all those to use them on multiple devices. However; in this domain the Google’s new Smart Lock feature for Android apps are very much useful if you are not limited to the web browsing. Most of the other services allow you to sign-in with Facebook ID and other social networking IDs, so instead of generating the new passwords you can use them.

Mobile phones and Fingerprints:

If you are not protecting your phone with pass-code, so someone can easily swipe your phone to get into your social media accounts and email accounts. Whereas; some of the latest iPhones, Samsung Galaxy and other high segment phones making it easier to use the phones by offering fingerprint option as the pass-code instead of four digit passwords or pattern lock. Now Apple is allowing the other app developers to use that fingerprint ID and through that you can unlock the banking apps by just tapping your figure. In upcoming Android update which is known as the M, Google is planning to make it easier for app makers to use fingerprint ID. However; Microsoft also planning to include the biometrics such as; fingerprint or iris scan in upcoming Windows 10 system.

Double layer of security:

Major service provider such as; Apple, Dropbox Google, Microsoft and Facebook are offering the second layer of security in cyber space by authentication in the form of numeric code, which send as the text messages on mobile phones. After entering the regular password you can type in the received code to verify it’s you not the hacker. To avail this service you need to go into the settings of your account where you need to activate the two-step verificationauthentication.

If there is way to sign-in through mobile number instead of e-mail address, so use mobile number for sign-in process. But you have to trust the service provider that they are not going to use them for marketing purpose.

1. Set your profile in private mode:

This is the best and most important security feature which everyone can access in secure way. It can prevent your personal information if anyone will try to peep into your profile. In the simple words Facebook and other leading social media networks will provide you enough option to get into invisible mode from those to whom you want to be invisible. You can update and hide each detail of your profile as per your comfort level. You can choose to whom you want to share your personal and professional details such as; your posts, friends list, events, your pictures, your shared content and more with different options such as; with friends, friends of friends and everyone. Ideally you should set it to your friends’ option. Of course, you will be visible on the social media platforms, but after privacy settings they will be not able to access any of your personal information.

2. Experiment with your own profile name:

IF someone has your name and other details so simple he will type it into the search box and he will get the direct link of your profile, so first of all try to hide all of your personal and professional details such as; email address, phone number, work information, address and more from everyone else. Once you will cover this area, so you need to do some experiments with your profile like; you can add some symbols or font or other language in your name because these things will make it difficult to find you on social media networks.

3. Use smaller pics in your profile and make your photo album private:

All the photos which you are sharing on online should have limitation from the visibility of everyone; it means it should only visible to your friends. It is advisable to upload smaller pictures and images, for that you can use some online tolls of you can crop them. There are cases when strangers will randomly click on your profile and download your picture for further use. If you will use the small pic, then people will avoid using it.

4. Avoid tagging and linking of the profile:

Tagging photos is one of the privacy loopholes as it will divert the stranger to your profile as the people who you have tagged can be the friends of stalkers, so better to be carefully with your privacy settings. It is highly recommended to avoid the unnecessary tagging of photos. Whenever you will tag someone, the other people will get the notification as if you want to tag, so click on yes and share it on your timeline.  Most of the time whenever you will visit on websites, so they ask you to log in through the Facebook or other social media platforms, it is advisable to avoid doing that because this process will provide them your email for such purposes.

Breakthrough Technologies for 2015

There has been a series of predictions made by the Progress software for the year 2015. The software has been able to make some strong predictions about expected breakthroughs. With the technology reaching to a point of wherein everyone has access to various kinds of technologies, according to the software, the application ice age will possibly see its end now. According to the software’s officials at their Progress Exchange 2014, today every app and their underlying technology have become very omnipresent. This has resulted in such an environment where in each and every person is now able to access affordable as well as various high powered devices.

With every company wanting to get their company at the top of the chart, Progress software has predicted 6 major technological trends for the coming year. The year 2015 will see companies encountering lots of technological issues and challenges in terms of application development. Looking at the current changes in the IT, software professionals will receive more requests for technological migrations and maintenance. With IT and business about to come and work together, they will contribute equally towards the development of applications. At the end combination of the right tools and the efficient approaches from the companies will emerge as winners.

So what are these predictions?

The very first prediction given by Progress is the unification of citizen developers and the response that will be received from IT. With IT failing to keep up with the changes, the increase in demand from the businesses, the expectations of users have increased towards the consumerization of the information technology.

The second prediction highlights that the construction will begin on the IoT Bridge. Companies will start using more of the IoT languages like that of Node.js, etc.

The third prediction made by Progress for the year 2015, developers will start to see a couple of punches with agile development as well as low-code environment. Although many companies are now relying on the cloud computing, there are others who are still taking a single approach towards a single platform. Companies will show different reactions towards the miscellany of applications and will use mixed developer skills for effective productivity and agility.

The next prediction focuses on the adoption of the Javascript by means of Node.js. According to Progress Company, as Java continues to grow and Node.js seeing success on the server side and together with MongoDb power, the growth of Javascript will reach new heights.

The next prediction by the software application is that organization will rely highly on data ponds. The year 2015 will see an evolution in the usage of Java with an increase in the number of data ponds or data streams. Organizations will start using their applications for including the data for extracting insights. According to the Progress Company, this will not only increase the worth of data.

The sixth prediction for 2015 is that the tech savvy customers will bid adieu to long waits in the queues. There will be increased usage of online ordering as customer’s experiences will become more reliable.