Tushar, Author at anteelo

Rethinking the banking value chain is a call to action.

Posted on 08/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

Financial services is shifting to platforms for business functions and processes, and that’s a good thing. Moving from applications to Software as a Service (SaaS) and then to Platform as a Service (PaaS) can create new value chains. It can also dramatically reduce the number of error-prone manual processes and foster industry collaboration for superior efficiencies.

Leverage open APIs and core banking systems

But financial services organizations can move even further — and to stay competitive, they’ll need to. Open APIs can help them combine bank data with third-party data and services to create innovative capabilities, essentially “hiring” third parties to provide these services. Banks can also provide best-of-breed capabilities as services to others.

As part of this shift, core financial systems and capabilities can become “consumable” via API-driven interfaces, creating specific outcomes. These core systems, such as payments and mobile wallets, essentially become services that both a bank and its third-party providers can consume.

Conversely, services from third-party providers can be integrated into banks’ own platforms. This may sound daring, but some tech giants — Facebook and Amazon among them — already do this, building new capabilities with APIs that can integrate and interact with capabilities provided by third-party providers. Banks can do it, too.

Partner with providers

Providers can also become partners. Some banks have invested in FinTechs, adopting an attitude of “If you can’t beat them, join them.” This should facilitate the development of important new services, including “know your customer” (KYC) and new accounts. A single bank can essentially stitch together a passel of services, then present them to customers under a single bank brand.

This reassessment of the value chain can free banking and capital markets organizations from the need to provide all services end-to-end. Instead, they can add open APIs that allow trusted third parties to provide various microservices.

The right platform can help banks grow through mergers and acquisitions, making it far easier to integrate disparate systems. This same feature can make it easier for banks to integrate the systems of partners too.

At the end of the digital transformation journey, financial services providers will enjoy a new position in their reconstituted ecosystem. They’ll fully understand their position in that value chain, their competitive advantage and areas of specialization, and their need to partner with third parties.

5 Key Features to Look For in Developer Hosting Solutions

Posted on 08/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

When it comes to finding a hosting solution, developers have specific needs. Whether they are developing websites or applications, they’ll need a hosting solution that provides them with all the resources, features and control required to undertake their development projects and the storage space to keep all the projects they have worked on. Here, we’ll look at five important features that developers should look for in their hosting.

1. Putting resources in place

Although each project will differ in its size, scope and complexity, developers will need hosting with the capacity to let them carry out their work unimpeded. This means finding a solution that provides all the server resources you need, including CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth. You’ll also be looking for exceptional performance from your hosting as it can speed up development time for you and your client, as well as improving how well the application or website performs when you show it to your client during development. Reliability is also key, so look for a hosting that provides a minimum of 99.9% uptime.

Ideally, therefore, a developer needs to shy away from shared hosting and adopt a more powerful solution, such as VPS, dedicated server or for those developing cloud-based applications, cloud hosting. To ensure optimal performance, look for hosting that includes the latest Intel Xeon processors and SSD storage which can significantly boost speed.

You should also bear in mind that you may need to scale up resources beyond what your current package provides. Should there be a need to do so, you’ll want this to be as quick, simple and undisruptive as possible. While the cloud offers unrivalled and instant scalability at the click of a button, if you choose VPS or dedicated server hosting, you need to make sure that your provider allows you to upgrade easily.

2. Putting you in control

As a developer, the hosting solution you choose must give you the flexibility to work on any type of project. This starts with having control over the choice of the operating system. Not only do you need a choice between Linux or Windows; you’ll also want to choose from the range of these systems to find the one which best suits the application you are developing.

Furthermore, you’ll also need hosting that supports and provides easy integration for the programming languages or frameworks that you need to work with. Solutions that provide 1-click installations for the key software and frameworks you intend to use don’t just save you the time and effort of a manual install, they increase the pace of the development too.

3. Getting to the root of things

Having root access is also vital for developers as it gives them complete control over their server. This gives you the freedom to configure the server in the most appropriate way for your projects and enables you to install and configure applications, run multiple websites and carry out various other important tasks.

4. Security built-in

Cybercrime continues to be a major headache for the IT community and developers need to ensure that the applications and websites they are developing are secure. The last thing you need is to have your client’s intellectual property and data stolen from your development server or to hand them over an application that has been stealthily infected with malware. Neither do you want the project having to go back to square one because of infection, corruption or ransomware or stalling because of a DDoS attack.

For this reason, choose a host that provides robust protection, including custom firewall rules, intrusion prevention, anti-DDoS, anti-malware, VPM and application security, to ensure your server is always protected.

For peace of mind and quick, easy restoration, a backup solution is essential for any developer.

5. Expert technical support

24/7 expert technical support is critical to developers whose projects may have them working with a range of different setups. Having an expert on tap to help you with any issues, regardless of the time of day, can provide indispensable assistance when you need it most. Make sure any hosting solution you choose has this included.

Conclusion As a developer, you’ll want to provide your clients with a first-class service and to do this, you’ll need first-class service from your hosting provider. You’ll require a high-performance solution that provides you with all the resources to carry out your projects; you’ll want the freedom to deploy the operating system of your choice and have full control over your server; you need the ability to use the programming languages, frameworks and software that the job demands as well as an

MLOps: Is This the Only Way to Eat an Elephant?

Posted on 08/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

Managing ML production requires a combination of data scientists (algorithm procrastinators) and operations (data architects, product owners? Yes, why not?).

Operationalizing ML solutions in on-prem or cloud environments is a challenge for the entire industry. Enterprise customers usually have a long and random software update cycle, usually once or twice a year. Therefore, it is impractical to couple the deployment of the ML model with irregular update cycles. Besides, data scientists have to deal with:

Data governance
Model serving & deployment
System performance drifts
Picking model features
ML model training pipeline
Setting the performance threshold
Explainability

And data architects have enough databases and systems to develop, install, configure, analyze, test, maintain… the verb would keep on accumulating, depending on the ratio of the company’s size to the number of data architects.

This is where MLOps come in to rescue the team, solution, and the enterprise!

What is MLOps?

MLOps is a new coinage, and the ML community keeps on adding/ perfecting its definition (as the ML life cycle continues to evolve, its understanding is also evolving). In layman terminology, it is a set of practices/disciplines to standardize & streamline ML models in production.

It all started when a data scientist shared his plight with a DevOps engineer. Even the engineer was unhappy with the incumbent (inclusion of) data and models in the development life cycle. In cahoots, they decided to amalgamate the practices and philosophies of DevOps and ML. Lo and behold! MLOps came into existence. This may not be entirely true, but you have to give credits to the growing community of ML & DevOps personnel.

Five years ago, in 2015, a research paper highlighted the shortcomings of traditional ML systems (third reference on this Wikipedia page). Even then, the ML implementation grew exponentially. After three years of the research’s publication, MLOps became mainstream – 11 years after DevOps! Yes, it took this long to combine the two. The reason is simple – AI became mainstream only a few years back, 2016, 2018, or 2019 (the year is debatable).

MLOps Lifecycle

MLOps brings the DevOps principles to your ML workflow. It allows continuous integration into data science workflows, automates code creation and testing, helps create repeatable training pipelines, and then provides continuous deployment workflow to automate the package, model validation, and deployment to the target server. It then monitors the pipeline, infrastructure, model performance, and new data and creates a data feedback flow to restart the pipeline.

These practice involving data engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers enables the retraining of models.

All seems hunky-dory at this stage; however, in my numerous encounters with the enterprise customers, and after going through several use cases, I have seen MLOps, although evolutionary & state-of-the-art, failing several times in delivering the expected result or RoI. The foremost reason, often discovered, because of –

The singular, unmotivated performance monitoring approach
Unavailability of KPIs to set/measure the performance
And lack of threshold to raising model degradation alerts

In contrast, these are the technical hindsight that is often vindictive because of the lack of MLOps standardization; However, a few business factors, such as lack of discipline, understanding, resources, can slog or disrupt your entire ML operations.

5 Data Security Tips for Working From outside Office

Posted on 07/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

One of the biggest advantages of the internet is that it has enabled business users to work away from the office. With technology such as laptops and smartphones, we can work from home and when commuting and take our data with us when we go to meet clients. While this brings a range of benefits, it also creates an increased responsibility to keep that data secure. In this post, weâ€™ll give you some tips on how to achieve that.

1. Backup regularly

Imagine that one of your employees develops a lucrative project for a client and is travelling to meet them. Imagine, too, that the only copy of the project is stored on the employeeâ€™s laptop. There are numerous weaknesses in this scenario. The laptop can break, it can get stolen or it can become one of the many that get mislaid by travellers every day. 12,000 laptops a week are left abandoned just at US airports.

The possible consequences of this are that the months of work put into the project are wasted and the lucrative contract is lost.

By backing up your data regularly, however, this problem can be completely eradicated. If the laptop is lost, youâ€™ll still have another copy of the data to use. While backing up can be done simply by saving data to a USB drive, the best option is to use a cloud backup service. You canâ€™t lose cloud storage like you do a pen drive and youâ€™ll be able to access the data from any machine with an internet connection.

2. Turn unused devices off

Another data security loophole is that people donâ€™t always realise that a laptop with the lid shut is still vulnerable to attack. Closing the lid simply initiates a low-power sleep mode designed to bring the machine back to life quicker than rebooting. While the hard disk powers down, the laptopâ€™s memory continues to be active and can be accessed and copied using an external USB port. Whatâ€™s perhaps worse, is that for encrypted laptops, the vulnerable memory can contain the encryption keys giving hackers access even to encrypted data.

The solution is simple, when devices are not in use, they should be shut down, not put into sleep mode.

3. Use encryption

Encryption turns your data into an unintelligible string of characters that even the boffins at GCHQ couldnâ€™t unscramble without an encryption key. It means that even if your raw data was hacked or stolen, no-one would be able to make sense of it.

As a safety precaution, all devices used out of the office should be protected with encryption software. Such apps can keep personal files, contacts, notes, wallets and multimedia files secure, as well as backing up your passwords, recording unauthorised login attempts and sending notifications of attempted hacks.

At the same time, those companies which store their data in the cloud should make sure that this too is encrypted, so that if a user gains access to the machine, there is another layer of protection to prevent them getting hold of the data stored online.

4. Network protection

Another potential vulnerability is someone getting access to data via an attack on the network. Devices are particularly vulnerable when they connect to mobile hotspots with weak data security and it is here, in places like transport stations and public areas that hackers may make attempts to steal your data.

One of the first steps you should take is to ensure employeeâ€™s devices have a properly configured firewall that will block suspicious connection requests. As a company, you should ensure the firewall configuration is put in place by your own IT team, whether this is on a company device or on a personal device that an employee uses for work.

Another data security feature is the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which will protect the usersâ€™ devices when they connect to any network away from the business premises. Though the connection is not as fast, the data will be automatically encrypted, preventing it being compromised by those seeking out victims on public networks.

5. Use cloud storage

Using cloud storage can really help boost the data security. For a start, as data is held centrally on the server, there is no need to have a separate copy of it stored on the laptop or other device. This way, if the device is lost or stolen, there is no data to steal. As data stored in the cloud can be encrypted, even if someone has access to the laptop, they will not be able to access the data without the encryption key, for which further authentication should be needed. The other benefit, of course, is that keeping data stored centrally means that should one person update a file, everyone else will have access to the latest version. When separate versions are stored across many different devices, it can be difficult to know which is the most up to date.

Conclusion

While the internet has given us better ways to work and communicate and freed us from the confines of the office, it does create risks that we need to manage effectively. Data stored on devices can be stolen by hackers accessing the hardware or from intrusion over a network. Hopefully, the tips provided here will help prevent this happening and keep your companyâ€™s devices and data secure.

The Supply Chain AI Hype and the Importance of a Digitized Supply Chain Control Tower

Posted on 07/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

The hype around Artificial Intelligence is far from fizzling out anytime soon. Digitalization and big data have completely penetrated the supply chain industry and are ubiquitous in nature. This article discusses one of the more interesting trends in the current supply chain analytics space – The Control Tower.

The concept of Air Control Towers and the Evolution of Digital Control Towers in Supply Chain

One may wonder if supply chain control towers have any correlation with air traffic controllers? To be honest, yes, there is!

An air traffic control tower (ATC), is a service provided by on-ground staff (controllers), who direct aircraft on the ground and through controlled airspace; they can provide advisory services to aircraft in non-controlled airspace. The primary purpose of ATC worldwide is to prevent collisions, organize and expedite the flow of air traffic, and provide information and other support for pilots (wiki). In short, the tower helps Improve flow, reduce emergency like situations through tactical interventions and provide inputs for right decision making. In fact, the ATC’s can now be enabled for an ‘auto-pilot’ mode wherein complex decisions are taken without human interventions. Only in cases where there is an absence of reliable data to make a trade-off, is where the humans intervene.

The digital control towers aim at keeping a bird’s eye view on the events occurring within the supply chain ecosystem (controlled and uncontrolled space), with the modus operandi being very similar to a generic air traffic controller. With the help of this consolidated view generated by the digital control towers in supply chain one can gain powerful insights about the current happenings within the organization. These insights help in improving flow across the organization, reducing urgencies and providing insights and tactical support to supply chain managers to make effective decisions. In fact, in the longer run, very similar to the ATC’s of today, the Supply chain control towers should have the capability to make complex decisions when there is adequate reliable data.

Significance of Digital Control Towers in Supply Chain

Corporations today want to leverage the useful applications of the supply chain control tower. Organizations have copious amounts of data across their supply chain and related functions. Over the past few years, they have managed to build business intelligence and analytics solutions to drive decision-making but at a node level. Extracting valuable insights using the right sets of data, lying across various nodes in an organization while also utilizing market intelligence, to deliver real-time visibility and provide meaningful insights that can drive decisions that are optimal cross organization, is the need of the hour. E.g., with the expected slow-down in sales on specific SKUs, a client may wonder if their manufacturing plant need to continue producing to plan OR does it make sense to course correct and lose capacity?

While an ATC is designed to minimize errors by incorporating huge factors of safety and commonly understood rules of engagement between various players (airlines, pilots, other ATCs), supply chain digital control towers have the luxury to experiment under statistical variability. E.g., Try different stock norms and check the impact on service levels, see whether a reduced Order-to-delivery promise induces better productivity and hence improved customer service levels and so on. This ability of a supply chain to experiment, try and fail or succeed quickly, at nominal cost can help build a virtuous loop of innovation with in a supply chain and drive a cultural change.

Most organization today recognize the impact a control tower can have on their organization. For a global organization, it is probably one of those platforms that will steer the supply chains of the future. Many organizations have tried implementing a control tower, but there have been very few examples of success. More often than not, organization fall short of implementing a “gold-standard” control tower capable of – real time visibility, predictive alerting, identifying bottle-necks to supply chains and providing insights that can drive decision; instead they end up implementing a large set of dashboards, that showcase different KPIs important to the various nodes in a supply chain.

This possibly is because of challenges that are faced when implementing an initiative as large as a control tower.

How does a Digital Supply Chain Tower work?

The SCCT should help an organization in making 3 key decisions – a) Ensure smooth flow-paths across the supply chain, b) Identify or predict bottlenecks / constraints to flow, and c) Derive efficiency/utilization improvement opportunities in the current network.

Hence, some of the key functionalities that are required would be:

End to end data connectivity: Ability to go beyond creating reports and tools that are not unidimensional but are able to work with data from different nodes in a supply chain is important.

Visibility: SCCT should provide visibility of key supply chain KPIs (simple and complex KPIs). They should showcase the right metrics, while also be able to project the impact of a decision on the metric real-time.

Analytics: Supply chain control towers are equipped with and boast of analytical tools and applications. With the help of these tools, supply chain managers can easily run what-ifs, and take calculated decisions. They can, easily harness the power of predictive analysis to detect ‘tripping points’, identify triggering alerts, as well as conduct root cause analysis of the data to arrive at solutions and address challenges.

Execution: The real benefit of the SCCT lies in the way the control tower communicates with the executive and the operational teams across the supply chain and allied functions. Hence this an important aspect of SCCT adoption within an organization

Key Challenges to Implementing a Supply Chain Control Tower

The supply chain control tower, unlike a typical analytics project, entails involvement from multiple functions and geographies across the supply chain (like the involvement of multiple VPs/SVPs in large enterprises).

Implementing SCCT would mean working with a team having – a) Different priorities, b) Very different data maturity and data quality, and c) Different products and software (some archaic and some new-age).

Some of the key challenges that appear during the construction and execution of SCCTs include –

When the SCCT implementation is picked up as a priority exercise by a single function within a supply chain without getting the other key function buy-in early into the transformation, there is a high chance the implementation will hit multiple road blocks.
Many a times, people tend to implement the most complex piece OR the piece of SCCT that seems most interesting. This may lead to no tangible results for an extended period, thus leading to lack of enthusiasm from fringe teams.
Data maturity: Different functions may have different levels of data maturity (availability, quality etc.). Inability to assess and map this aspect will tend to escalate timelines and cost.
Sometimes the implementing partner makes the mistake of selling the SCCT, not as a strategic tool that can transform business functions but rather as another software that will improve business efficiencies. This will lead to wasted effort that implementation will get driven in completely wrong direction.
There are number of proven analytics tools and products that exist with the client. Integrating these existing tools/products in the SCCT roadmap, may cause issues during implementation but will help adoption.

A typical issue of not successfully overcoming these challenges is that companies go down the path of SCCT implementation (visibility, predictive analytics, decision tools etc.) but end up implementing an end-to-end KPI dashboard. Though the dashboard may still bring in benefits, it causes disillusionment amongst the client project team in terms of SCCT capabilities.

Some of the ways to mitigate these challenges and move towards a successful implementation include –

Treat SCCT implementation as a strategic initiative and not as an IT implementation. Hence, it is critical to have someone high in the business team (CSO level) bless the initiative.
When prioritizing sprints, give equal weights to simple but quick wins – this motivates the client’s project team.
Always assess the current tools and products in client environment, i.e., prioritize integration over innovation.
Continuous engagement with all functions (even if there is nothing happening in a specific function) is important and should be made into a practice.

The Dedicated Server : Role in Digital Transformation

Posted on 07/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

When businesses think of digital transformation, cloud migration is often the first thing that comes to mind. Indeed, the cloud is a necessary requirement: it’s cost-effective, easily scalable and puts the latest technologies, like data analytics, automation, AI, ML and IoT at your fingertips. However, if you intend to deploy the best technology for the task at hand, the dedicated server still has an important role to play. Here, we’ll look at why dedicated servers are a key element in digital transformation.

Security

Data is the driving force behind digital transformation. Companies are collecting it in greater quantities than ever before to analyse it and discover the insights that lead to improvements in operations, marketing, finance, procurement and many other areas of the business.

However, while the cloud is the best place in which to carry out analytics, for some organisations, it is not necessarily the best place to store the data, especially personal and sensitive data. That’s not to say that the cloud is less secure than a dedicated server, both can be configured to the same exacting security standards. At eukhost, for example, we can offer the same protection for both, using next-gen FortiGate firewalls whose advanced security features include intrusion detection, anti-malware, DDoS protection, VPN and DMZ.

The difference lies in the needs of the individual company. If your business stores personal or sensitive information and has to comply with regulations such as GDPR, you may require a data storage solution that, unlike the public cloud, is not multi-tenancy. The role of the dedicated server here is that its single-tenancy storage offers greater compliance with stringent regulations. Additionally, some hosts, like eukhost, can develop and implement a security policy that meets both your internal and regulatory requirements, providing services that include intrusion detection and prevention, application firewall configuration, DDoS protection, email security and more.

In a world where cybercriminals are using ever more sophisticated tools, such as Ransomware as a Service, and where the number of cyberattacks involving data theft is continually on the rise, a dedicated server could be a wisely chosen component of your digital transformation infrastructure.

Performance

The other chief reason for deploying a dedicated server is that digital transformation often requires organisations to run resource-heavy applications which they will need to perform flawlessly. While the cloud does offer very high performance, our cloud VM’s underlying hardware, for example, features Xeon E5-2600s with 8 to 12 cores, for organisations which need it, a dedicated server can offer even greater performance.

The main reason for this is that you can define your own specification and build a bespoke dedicated server that perfectly matches your CPU, RAM and storage requirements. You have a choice of core or frequency optimised CPUs or both; single, dual or quad processors; and SSD storage and PCIe based drives. You can choose the processor speed and the number of cores and disks, giving you complete control of your environment.

For organisations needing to run resource-heavy applications, a dedicated server offers the best performance. Your applications will run faster, with those which rely on database access, like CMS, carrying out non-cached queries and data writes much quicker. With SSDs installed, a dedicated server can perform thousands of simultaneous reads and writes without the application having to wait around for the storage, as it would with HDDs. In addition, backups and restoration will be performed quicker and your server will respond more rapidly.

Other benefits of dedicated servers

Dedicated servers come as part of a hosting package and these provide organisations with other important benefits. This includes cost-effective server management with round the clock monitoring and maintenance of your system; geographical redundancy, off-site backup and replication services; and, importantly, 24 x 7 x 365 expert technical support, so that if you have an issue, it can be dealt with straight away.

Not a solution for every workload

Of course, a digitally transformed company needs to use the best technology for each workload and a dedicated server is not the number one choice for everything. While its single tenancy provides enhanced security and bespoke hardware offers superior performance, the virtualisation technology employed in the cloud makes it better for running mission-critical applications that need high availability rates of 100% uptime. Similarly, the cloud is also the better environment for workloads which need quick and easily scalable resources to cope with unexpected spikes in demand. Indeed, its pay as you go charging structure also makes this highly cost-effective.

Conclusion

For companies seeking the right technology for their digital transformation, dedicated servers have an important role to play. They offer the best solution for running resource-heavy applications and provide a secure, single tenancy storage environment for personal and sensitive data. The latest hosting packages ensure that companies have access to the best hardware and the most advanced security tools while being able to take advantage of server management solutions, backup and replication services, and around the clock support.

Critical MLOps Roadblocks that Will Delay Your AI Journey in the Enterprise

Posted on 07/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

How do you retract the steps that led to the model’s creation, say, your data scientists are away for some reason?

How will you reproduce predictions to validate its outcome, say, someone shoots the question?

It is not just about resourcing data scientists, software developers, or data engineers to work in isolation to achieve the operationalization and automation of the ML lifecycle. It is about how the three can work in tandem as a unit. For this, the data’s quality or availability must remain identical across the process & environment to ensure the model performs on par with the set metrics. Again, the core problem boils down to operation and automation, which we diligently tried/try to address via MLOps.

To solve the problem’s crux, you first need to answer a few questions:

How do the three personas, i.e., data engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers, use different tools and techniques?
How do you collaborate on the ML workflow within and between teams?

As you cannot share models like other software packages, you need to share the ML pipeline that can reproduce and tune the model based on new data specific to the new environment/scenario. A ubiquitous work culture or norm in large enterprises is to have independent data science teams, and most of whom are engaged, day in and day out, on similar workflows.

Now, how do you collaborate and share the results?
When it comes to enterprise readiness, how do you plan data/ ML model governance while dealing with data & ML?
When you deal with specialized hardware, cost management comes into play as you have to compute with large amounts of GPU, memory, jobs that take a long time to run. Some of these jobs can take days or even weeks to run to get a good model. So how do you establish the trust?

Having insights, even dismal, will help you identify the real-time use cases and factor in an Enterprise AI plan.

What Next? Martian Version for Earthling Solution?

ML Works Will Just Do!

Most MLOps toolkit often focus on the technical aspect of the MLOps, while ignoring its real-life impact. Other factors that can weigh in its contribution are having a 360-degree view and control on the micro/macro aspects of the data science process.

At Anteelo, we have tried reordering the ML alphabets with our proprietary suite of toolkits, in which we take immense pride. We call it ML Works. The solution, which is cloud-agnostic and scalable, automates the model’s build, deploy, and monitoring processes, thereby reducing the need for larger teams.

6 Tips for Online Stores to Survive Christmas 2020

Posted on 06/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

Christmas 2020 is going to be unlike anything anyone has ever experienced and as an online retailer, you are going to need to start your preparations now. The forecasts are mixed. The potential for further lockdown restrictions and increasing unemployment may impact both consumer spending and purchasing habits. More optimistically, for eCommerce, there is going to be a significant shift in Christmas shopping from bricks and mortar to online stores. In this post, we’ll explain six things you can do to help your online store survive Christmas 2020.

1. Get the right stock for Christmas

Stock may be a complicated issue for eCommerce stores this Christmas. Rises in unemployment and the fear of becoming unemployed will certainly affect consumer spending and this may impact the quantities of stock you need to order. Additionally, social restrictions put in place to prevent the risk of the virus spreading are also likely to influence what people spend their money on. Who’s going to want Christmas party outfits if there are no parties? Who’s going to buy a pack of 12 crackers when, this year, there’ll only be four people sat around the table? The pandemic is going to change what consumers buy and businesses need information on those trends to ensure stock is purchased wisely.

Another concern is the supply chain. Even if you have identified the stock you need for the Christmas season, you will need to ensure that you can procure it and that shipping times can be met. Volatility in the supply chain is likely given increasing demand and the potential for disruption due to the virus. Early purchasing might be a necessity.

2. Spread the cost of Christmas

Another reason to acquire Christmas stock earlier than usual is that, with consumer finances stretched, people might start shopping earlier to spread the cost. Rather than a Christmas rush, 2020 might be more of a slow burn.

One way to maximise sales and help customers out would be to offer payment by instalments. The easiest way to do this is to open a PayPal business account through which you can offer flexible financing options that make purchasing easier for your customer. Alternatively, you could set up a savings scheme where customers pay into your business each month in order to spend what’s in credit nearer the time.

3. Get your shipping sorted

eCommerce sales have already grown significantly during the pandemic and Christmas is likely to see a further surge as shoppers stay away from bricks and mortar stores. This could affect the capacity of the carriers you use to deliver the products on time.

The challenge for online stores is to ensure that you get the product to the customer when and where they want it. While consumers have been relatively understanding about longer delivery times during the pandemic, six months down the line, they now expect retailers and carriers will be able to deliver as advertised and are likely to be much less happy when products arrive late – especially when shopping for Christmas.

4. Cut costs

The global downturn means there will be less money for people to spend this Christmas. While social distancing measures means bricks and mortar stores are likely to face the brunt of the decline, it may still affect eCommerce: people may buy more things online but spend less overall.

To keep the business viable, eCommerce companies may have to look at ways to cut costs, especially if lack of demand causes a discounting war and drives margins down. Those in the best position to achieve this are the companies which make use of the cloud. While the cloud itself is a substantially more cost-effective solution to an in-house datacentre, its ability to deploy data gives companies the insights needed to cut costs effectively over their entire operations. At the same time, the cloud enables businesses to make valuable use of automation, such as with sales assisting chatbots that reduce human involvement.

5. Widen the market

Maximising sales is going to be critical this winter and this means making sure your stock is highly visible. This starts with strengthening your digital presence: promoting Christmas stock earlier on your website, advertising online and increasing your seasonal-themed social media activity. For retailers with online and physical stores, benefits can be made from offering omnichannel shopping, click and collect and moving products from stores under local lockdown restrictions to those which are not.

Additionally, there is always the potential to sell your items on third-party websites, like Amazon or eBay, which have a wider reach and high levels of consumer trust when it comes to availability, delivery and consumer purchasing protection.

6. Don’t let your website go down

The likely surge in demand for online shopping means that companies must ensure that their hosting package is capable of handling increased traffic. Too many visitors at the same time can impact the performance of your website if you don’t have enough server resources, i.e. storage, RAM, CPU and bandwidth, to handle them. Unexpected surges can cause your site to perform slowly or even crash. If this happens, visitors will abandon the site, reducing the number of sales, and your reputation for online reliability will be damaged.

Conclusion

Christmas 2020 presents eCommerce businesses with opportunities and threats. The challenge is to put your online store in the best position to avoid the threats and maximise the opportunities. Hopefully, this post has shown you the different things you will need to consider and the importance of starting preparations early.

7 Steps to a More Effective Data Management

Posted on 06/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

Data has become one of the most valuable resources for business, providing key insights about the company and its market. However, with so much data available for analysis, the need for effective data management is becoming increasingly important. Here are some the steps you can take to ensure your company is using best practice when it comes to managing your data.

1. Know what you want to use data for

Today, companies are gathering enormous quantities of data. Much of that, however, will never be used. To make data management easier, it is important to know what you want from your data so that you keep that which helps meet your objectives and get rid of that which does not. This will help reduce storage costs and make it easier to organise and manage what data is kept. If you have data which is not useful at present but which you want to keep in case it becomes useful in the future, you can always condense it and store it separately.

There are many things you may wish to use your data for. These include data-driven decision-making, automation and processing improvement, customer journey mapping and personalisation, audience targeting, product recommendations and so forth. Knowing what your objectives are will help ensure you only gather and collect the data that you need.

2. Security and compliance are key priorities

All companies are obliged to comply with data protection regulations, such as GDPR, and this means compliance should be foremost on your list of priorities. Failure to comply or implement stringent security measures can have devastating consequences. Under GDPR, businesses can be fined up to €40 million or 4% of annual global revenue, whichever is the greatest. For British Airways, this was an eye-watering €204.6 million. On top of any fines, there are also reputational damage and case actions to consider.

Working with the right hosting provider, implementing robust security policies and using secure data management software can help your data to be more secure.

3. Data quality is vital

The quality of the insights your data can provide is based upon the quality of the data you are using. While the first step to improving quality is to limit data to that which meets your company’s goals, it is also vital that data is accurate and up-to-date. Inaccurate or out-of-date information can provide misleading insights and lead to companies making the wrong decisions. For this reason, cleansing data should be something undertaken regularly.

Quality can also be improved by ensuring that employees know how to accurately gather and input data or that systems which collect data automatically are configured to do so correctly.

4. Eradicate duplicate data

Not only does duplicate data means you’ll pay for more storage than you need; there’s also the chance that it will be counted twice during any analysis and will, thus, skew the accuracy of any report generated using it. As there are various ways to receive duplicate data, companies need to put processes in place to discover and prevent it from being inputted into the data management system.

5. Managing access to data

There are two important things to consider when looking at access to data. The first is that, for data analytics to be effective, team members need access to all relevant datasets. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when it is stored in departmental silos where access is restricted to departmental members. Unifying data in a centralised repository, like a data warehouse, removes silos and ensures everyone can have the big picture. It also means data security can be centrally managed.

The second consideration is balancing security with ease of access. This means setting up logical access control where permission to access data and tools is granted on an individual basis depending on the employee’s needs. Not only does this ensure employees only use data they have the authorisation to access; it also means that if their accounts are hacked, hackers won’t have unlimited access to the company’s entire data or its applications.

6. Make sure data can be recovered

Data loss can happen for a whole host of reasons, including human error, malware, hardware failure, natural disasters, hacking and so forth. While losing personal data can get the company into hot water over compliance, all the other data your company relies on will have significant value too. Losing that data can put a company out of business. To ensure it doesn’t happen, having a remote backup system in place is crucial.

Ideally, you should schedule automated backups to be taken at the intervals which the company needs. For the increasing numbers of businesses who receive data continuously, this will mean having continuous backups taking place, so that, if the worst happens, you have as much recent data as possible to restore. Cloud storage is often the best solution as it is scalable, secure, integrity tested, can be encrypted and is easily accessed for restoration.

7. Choose the right hosting provider

The hosting provider plays a vital role in ensuring good data management. They will provide and manage the infrastructure needed and implement a range of stringent security measures including firewalls, encryption, intrusion protection, backup services, etc. Those opting for a cloud solution will also benefit from the scalability and payment model of cloud when it comes to storage and processing capacity. Crucially, however, is choosing a host that understands your goals and your needs and which can supply the expertise and computing environment your data management requires.

Conclusion

Effective data management is essential for businesses to make the best use of big data analytics and the insights it provides. Knowing what you want to use that data for, improving its quality, eradicating duplications and making it easier to access are key elements in that management strategy. So, too, are ensuring the data is secure, setting up logical access, making remote backups and choosing the right hosting provider.

The way airlines handle “bumpy” situations can make or break the passenger experience.

Posted on 06/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

Today’s airline passengers reap the benefits from reservation technology and highly productive and easy-to-use mobile apps that in many cases engage with multiple websites seamlessly and transparently. All this is made possible because airlines have done a very good job over the past five years modernizing their customer interfaces.

While passengers certainly appreciate these great new tech tools, the quality of the latest app or cool biometric feature at the airport doesn’t matter much if a loyal client gets delayed overnight and misses an important meeting the next morning, or if a grandmother can’t make her grandson’s wedding on time.

Too often airlines forget there are real people traveling on these flights, and whether it’s for corporate or personal travel, it’s the flight experience as a whole that matters to an airline customer. Things can and will go wrong during a journey. But good airlines become great by how they deal with the “bumps” that occur as they strive to get passengers to their destinations with the least possible disruption.

This was less complicated in the past when airlines controlled all aspects of the passenger journey. But changes in the industry brought more vendors and more complex – often unconnected – IT systems. In this environment, ensuring a seamless end-to-end customer experience has become a more challenging endeavor. That said, there are three steps that airlines can take to improve the passenger experience:

Build a rock-stable foundation. This means getting the basics right: clean aircraft, courteous flight attendants and efficient baggage handling. Nobody wants to hear that her suitcase was lost or to deal with an impatient flight attendant. The foundational elements are roughly 80 percent of the airline’s equation, so it’s important they work hard to get them right – and create systems, such as easy-to-use text notifications, to make the accommodation process run smoothly.
When something does go wrong, personalize the recovery and communicate! A single mechanical failure or server outage can result in a cascading effect that can ground flights and strand passengers for days, as the airline struggles to get back on track. But when airlines deal with the operational aspects of the recovery, they must also remember that real people are impacted by the disruption – people who need information and an assurance that the airlines will meet their individual needs while their flight is grounded. Airlines need to communicate, but after the bad news has been delivered, they can also offer tangible compensation, such as refunds, expanded benefits in their loyalty or frequent flier programs, or complimentary hotel accommodations until flights resume. Another option: Give passengers greater personal control over their own recovery plan. Lufthansa, for example, has been developing self-service apps that let passengers respond personally to service disruptions in response to alerts from the airline.
Deliver strategic add-on applications. Only when airlines get the basics right and develop a strategy for dealing with problems as they arise can they create an environment where the new technology applications start to matter. Passengers are already accustomed to logging on to airlines’ websites to compare prices, receiving their boarding passes on their mobile phones and using kiosks to print out boarding passes when they arrive at the airport. With biometrics and facial recognition, there’s much more to come. Airlines are just scratching the surface on how technology can improve the customer experience.

With many more options than they had in the past, customers will give their business to the airlines that put them first when things go wrong. Speaking from personal experience, I still won’t fly with a particular airline after their poor handling of a mechanical failure that kept me away from home on the night my dog passed away. I’d like to think that this experience is both isolated and preventable.

So, through a focus on the basics and a clear technology strategy, airlines can minimize the damage any one incident may cause to ensure a positive end-to-end customer experience and retain customer loyalty. Customers and business partners like me are depending on it.

Leverage open APIs and core banking systems

Partner with providers

1. Putting resources in place

2. Putting you in control

3. Getting to the root of things

4. Security built-in

5. Expert technical support

1. Backup regularly

2. Turn unused devices off

3. Use encryption

4. Network protection

5. Use cloud storage

Conclusion

The concept of Air Control Towers and the Evolution of Digital Control Towers in Supply Chain

Significance of Digital Control Towers in Supply Chain

How does a Digital Supply Chain Tower work?

Key Challenges to Implementing a Supply Chain Control Tower

Security

Performance

Other benefits of dedicated servers

Not a solution for every workload

Conclusion

1. Get the right stock for Christmas

2. Spread the cost of Christmas

3. Get your shipping sorted

4. Cut costs

5. Widen the market

6. Don’t let your website go down

Conclusion

1. Know what you want to use data for

2. Security and compliance are key priorities

3. Data quality is vital

4. Eradicate duplicate data

5. Managing access to data

6. Make sure data can be recovered

7. Choose the right hosting provider

Conclusion

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Atlanta

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Take a look at our global hideouts.