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What Are App Containers, and Do You Really need Them?

Posted on 20/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

App containers have helped transform the way companies run their software, but despite being around for almost a decade, for many people, the term ‘app container’ remains one of those obscure pieces of IT jargon. Here, we aim to give you a clear understanding of what app containers are, what they’re used for and whether they might be a solution that’s useful for your business.

What are app containers?

An app container is like any other form of container, it’s what you put something in to keep it separate from what’s around it and to move it from place to place. In IT, what you put in a container is software. The idea is that putting an application in a container prevents it from conflicting with other applications or not working properly when move to a different environment.

How are containers useful?

One of the biggest benefits of a container is that they enable the software within it to work independently from the environment in which they are located and this prevents issues from arriving when they are moved from one environment to another.

A typical example is an app developed using one version of an operating system (OS) and then moved to an environment with a different version. Without a container, the app might work flawlessly in development but when moved might hit problems that prevent it from working as expected. It’s not just operating systems that can have this effect, so too can programming languages, PHP versions, SSL libraries, network structure and various other differences.

A container prevents this from happening by placing the software in a self-contained environment of its own where it can be moved without issue. In other words, a container is a complete runtime environment for the software and contains all the other things it is dependent on to run. In a sense, it works like a submarine or a spacecraft, supporting the life inside regardless of what alien environments they travel to.

Additional benefits of containers

Virtualisation can be used as an alternative to containers as applications and their operating systems running on virtual machines can also be easily moved across different hardware. The key difference is that containerised applications usually require smaller storage, enabling a company to host more containers than virtual machines on a server. This can help reduce the costs of running applications in a cloud environment. Another advantage containers have over virtual machines is that they can be booted almost instantaneously, whereas a virtual machine takes several minutes.

From a development and management point of view, another benefit is that applications can be separated into their individual parts (microservices) and each of these placed in their own container, for example, the front-end in one container and the database in another. This approach is useful as it enables each microservice to be modified independently without the developer having to rewrite the entire software. It also means companies can save money as they don’t need to run the full application at all times. By providing instant availability, containers can be used to turn different microservices on and off as and when the application needs them.

A well-established technology

After almost a decade, containers have become an established part of the IT landscape and some prominent organisations are helping to develop them. The Open Container Project (OCP), run by the Linux Foundation, is the key initiative in the field, with the aim of standardising container formats and runtime software across different platforms so that they can benefit everyone. In addition, this open-source approach has led to improvements in container security and management systems and the development of freely available container management systems, such as the well-known Kubernetes that was kickstarted by Google. The OCP is supported by industry giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, VMware and many others.

Would app containers be useful for my company?

The fact that containerised applications tend to use less storage and because individual microservices can be turned on and off as needed so they use fewer resources means their adoption could help companies reduce the cost of their cloud services – especially because cloud services are charged for on a pay per use basis. Whether this could be a significant saving depends, of course, on the size of the overall application and the extent of the resources it uses.

Another value is that containers help prevent vendor lock-in. In the past, companies have felt tied to a vendor because they have been concerned that moving their application to a new provider with a different environment might cause their applications to falter. Containers prevent this from happening. They also make it far less problematic to move applications across environments for any other reason and make it easier to modify microservices in isolation from the rest of the application.

Conclusion

Today, many companies use containers to house their applications in the cloud and, with most platforms being free to use and their formats standardised, they look certain to remain part of the cloud landscape for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, from reading this article you’ll now be aware of what app containers are, what they are used for and how they could benefit your business.

Cloud Computing Technology : Advantages for Schools

Posted on 19/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Cloud adoption is not just something for big business. Today, schools across the globe are adopting it for the numerous benefits it brings, including for staff, students and parents. Here, we’ll look at the ways cloud technology is transforming education and bringing schools into the 21^st Century.

1. Cut costs

With staff costs swallowing around 80% of school budgets and changes to school funding having an impact, business managers are hard pushed to make ends meet. Over recent years, school savings that have taken decades to accrue have dwindled. At the same time, schools are increasingly having to modernise their IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with technological developments and keep their curricula up to date. This often requires the purchase of expensive servers, as well as paying for the additional IT expertise to manage them and the ongoing energy costs to keep them running and cool.

Moving to the cloud technology eliminates the need to buy on-site servers completely, replacing them with a vendor-hosted infrastructure that is paid for with a more manageable monthly cost. And with no hardware to manage and maintain at school the burden on IT staff is reduced, freeing them up to work on more important, school-related tasks. In addition, with no 24/7 air-conditioning and power to pay for, further cost reductions can be made.

The hardware savings and reduction in other costs is even bigger for multi-academy trusts, as they will only need a single cloud package to cover all of their schools. This trust-wide system can then be controlled by a single team at the trust’s HQ, rather than needing staff in each school.

2. Everywhere accessibility

One of the biggest practical advantages of moving to the cloud technology is that it enables data and information to be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. This means teachers and pupils can access files, documents and other learning resources anywhere – something that has been absolutely critical during the pandemic. They can also collaborate and communicate far easier using a wide range of devices, communication channels and specially developed education platforms.

With highly secure logical access control in place, schools can restrict access to information so that only those given permission can have access. This can be done on an individual basis so that each person is given the right access to the information they need. With logical access in place and school data and files stored centrally online, the possibilities for extending learning beyond the classroom and enabling staff to collaborate are endless.

3. Better parents’ evenings

The cloud opens the door to a new way to hold parents’ evenings. Over the last year, we have seen many schools using the cloud to replace face to face parents’ evenings with video calls – something that both parents and staff have found favourable. Parents are happy because they can book appointments to suit online and don’t need to travel to the school, struggle for a parking space or wait endlessly in a queue while appointments drag on over the allocated times. Online, they last exactly as long as the school sets them, usually five minutes.

Online parents’ evenings are also good for the school. They reduce the burden on staff as no one has to timetable the appointments and send hundreds of print outs, the school doesn’t need a super-clean and furniture rearrangement, and there’s no need to provide refreshments or pay someone to serve them. Teachers, meanwhile, can hold their appointments from home instead of having to stay late and wait for hours before the event actually begins. Online, they’ll also have access to the data they need for the meetings and can even share it on screen. Additionally, the school doesn’t need to be heated or lit and the caretaker doesn’t need to be paid overtime. There are also benefits to the wider community as local roads won’t be blocked by traffic, residents won’t find their parking spots filled and there’ll be less pollution.

4. Real-time data – on tap

The use of data has become vital for schools in helping them drive everything from whole-school initiatives to improving the progress of individual students. Increasingly, school leaders, classroom teachers, pupils and parents need to access that data and want it up to date. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when that data is not held centrally. If individual teachers or departments store their most recent data on local machines or even portable drives, what’s available to everyone might be out of date and won’t give the current picture.

The cloud can transform the way data is stored, managed and accessed. Held centrally, everyone can access the data they are permitted to access and be assured that it’s the most up-to-date version available. What’s more, data held centrally doesn’t get lost when people accidentally delete it from a machine or lose their portable drive. It also means data can be backed up online quickly and securely, instead of IT staff having to make daily backups to other drives or disks in school.

5. Cut the costs of print and paper (financially and environmentally)

Schools spend a fortune on paper and printing, much of which, today, is unnecessary. Instead of handing out numerous worksheets for students to complete classwork and homework with pen and pencils, they can be completed and marked online. This also ensures there’s a permanent copy of them which doesn’t go missing and reduces the amount of old schoolwork taking up valuable storage space in stockrooms across the building.

The same goes for the copious amount of literature that schools send home: letters to parents, newsletters, consent forms, pupil guides, uniform regulations and so forth. All of these can be made available online and parents can be sent text messages or emails with a link to download them. What’s more, making them available online means parents can go back and relook at them at a later date which is hard to do if paper and email versions have been put in the trash.

Of course, the financial benefits are boosted by the environmental ones. The CO2 generated by manufacturing and transporting paper and printing out messages are vastly reduced. That’s not to say that sending electronic communications is carbon-free, it isn’t, but the environmental impact is significantly less.

6. Personalised environments

Personalisation is one of the major benefits of cloud technology and has been seized upon by businesses to improve the customer experience. Just think of how your Amazon homepage is personalised for you when you log in. This is something that the cloud also enables you to achieve as a school.

Its main benefit is for students. Here children can have personalised learning environments created for them, helping schools address accessibility issues for individual students and providing all pupils with schoolwork that is customised for their individual needs. It’s a highly effective way to provide all students with individual learning plans that can be easily managed and implemented. This, indeed, is a far more beneficial project for your IT team to work on than managing an on-site server.

It’s not just pupils that benefit either. Teachers can have personalised areas of their school portal making it easier to access the data, files and information they need, helping them do their jobs more effectively, instead of having to sift through a portal designed for everyone’s use. The same applies to parents. Overall, it improves everyone’s experience of accessing the school online.

Conclusion

Schools can no longer ignore the digital transformation that is taking the world by storm. Digital products and services are benefitting users in all aspects of life and staff, students and parents expect to be able to make use of these technologies in the school environment. From a school’s perspective, adopting cloud technology is essential to make use of these digital services and benefit from the advantages they bring.

Is Your Online Store Meeting Customers’ Expectations?

Posted on 18/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Today, winning new customers and keeping them loyal is all down to customer experience (CX). It’s the major area of competition in the online retail market and one that businesses have heavily invested in. The result is that CX has improved rapidly over the last few years and this has raised the bar in customer expectations. To stay competitive, websites need to deliver what their customers want, not simply in terms of the products they sell but in the quality of the experience that customers have when they shop with you. With over 80% of consumers saying they’ll abandon a brand if their online experience is poor, it’s something you can no longer ignore. With that in mind, here are some of the most important things today’s experience-led consumers want from a retail website.

1. Instant loading and response

Patience isn’t a virtue shared by many of today’s internet users, so if your website is slow, they’re not going to hang around waiting for it. What they expect – and what successful eCommerce sites are achieving – is super-fast loading and response times. Fail in this and you’ll see a decline of 7% in your conversion rates for every second your site takes to load or react to a click, search or input. And that doesn’t matter whether a visitor is sat at home with mega speed broadband or out in the wild with an old phone and 3G connection.

While you can optimise your website to the Nth degree to speed things up, at the end of the day, what puts a jet engine in your loading times is the performance of your hosting. For growing eCommerce sites serious about getting up to speed and making sure you have enough oomph to stay fast when times are busy, you should consider upgrading from shared hosting to VPS. This way, you’ll have enough storage, CPU, RAM and bandwidth to deliver those expected speeds.

2. A slick design

Your website doesn’t have to win design awards or be outlandishly quirky in how it looks; however, it needs to be slick in how it works for your customer. Yes, it has to be designed around the brand and easy on the eye, but most importantly, it needs to be well organised and simple to navigate so that customers can quickly and easily find their way around, add products to the shopping cart and check out. Essentially, you aren’t just designing a website, you are designing a shopping experience, so take advantage of all those plugins and tools that help make that experience great.

3. Reduce the clicks

The more clicks your visitors need to take to find the right products, the fewer of them that will make it to the check-out. It’s a speed thing again – and the more products you have, the longer it can take to find them.

What customers expect is what they see on websites like Amazon and eBay: well-organised product categories, search bars, detailed menus and product filters that make it easy to find the product they want by brand, colour, size, weight, price and so forth.

4. Product pages that are actually useful

Buying online isn’t easy because you can’t examine the product. This leaves potential customers with plenty of questions that a useful product page would answer. A great shopping experience makes it easy for a customer to make a purchasing decision and websites need to put the time and effort into supplying all the information a customer might want to know. If you sell the product, even at a good price, but don’t answer visitors’ questions, they’ll go elsewhere.

What should you include on a product page? Looking at the world’s most popular retail site, Amazon, is a good starting point. Here, you’ll find zoomable images, detailed descriptions and specifications, buying options, customer questions and answers, delivery information and a plethora of related products and upsells.

5. Product reviews

If you want to sell something, you obviously make it sound and look as good as possible – that’s what marketing is all about. The online shopper, however, isn’t going to take your word for it. Scepticism is a built-in shopping behaviour and the modern consumer expects you to provide independent, genuine feedback about the products you sell. This makes product reviews a necessity on the modern website.

6. Personalisation

Personalisation is the biggest driver of customer loyalty and provides the customer experience most valued by today’s consumers. Online shoppers love it when a website provides personalised offers and product recommendations and they spend more as a result. This, of course, has made personalisation a key area of competition for online stores.

Doing it right, however, can be challenging. You’ll need to collect personal data, analyse browsing and shopping histories, deploy a product recommendation engine and set up customer accounts in order to create personalised homepages and send personalised marketing messages. The amount of data and computing resources needed might also require you to upgrade your hosting solution.

Conclusion

As customer experience evolves, consumers will expect the stores they shop with to continually improve their website and offer new, enhanced experiences. As a result, customer expectations never stay the same. To ensure your website stays successful in today’s highly competitive market, it is vital to meet those ever-changing expectations. Hopefully, the points discussed here will help you move forward.

The five Key eCommerce shopping Trends

Posted on 18/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

The last twelve months have seen significant change in the online retail market. The number of people buying online has risen sharply, as has online spending as a percentage of all retail spending. While this growing market provides greater opportunity for online stores, they are having to adapt rapidly to shifts in consumer behaviour and emerging technologies. Here, we’ll look at what the most important trends are for online stores.

1. Personalised shopping

Beyond its speedy delivery and vast range of products, one of the reasons Amazon dominates the eCommerce market is because it delivers highly personalised shopping experiences. With data gathered from browsing histories, wish lists and previous purchases, together with freely given information, such as date of birth, gender and location, they use AI-powered product recommendation engines to create individualised homepages that display highly relevant products. Customers love this experience and reward Amazon for it with increased spending and long-term loyalty.

2. Omnichannel shopping

It is such a popular model with consumers that it has become one of the major trends for eCommerce stores everywhere over the last few years. The difference today, however, is that signed-up shoppers expect every homepage to be personalised when they log in.

To stay competitive and build stronger relationships with customers, online stores need to embrace personalisation, not just in the shopping experiences they offer, but with their communications and marketing too.

With so many different ways to shop available today, customers are expecting stores to make it easy for them to switch seamlessly between one and the other. They may, for example, put a product in the shopping cart on your website, want to check out using your mobile app and then pick it up from a physical store or collection site. Similarly, they may want to communicate via your social media page and then pick up the same conversation later on telephone or online chat.

This is one of the most sought-after customer experiences and companies that offer it benefit enormously from customer loyalty. However, doing it means unifying your inventory, sales and communications systems so that there is a single overview – without this, omnichannel experiences are impossible.

3. Mobile shopping

Smartphones have become the most popular device for browsing the internet and they are being increasingly used to buy online. They account for over 60% of all traffic to online stores and over half of sales. As a result, online retailers are increasingly putting efforts into improving the mobile versions of their websites, helping them to load faster, make finding and viewing products easier and making it simpler to checkout.

Rather than rely on responsive themes, many are developing independent mobile sites that have streamlined content and specially designed layouts that improve the mobile shopping experience.

4. Sustainable shopping

The green revolution is having a major effect on consumers’ choice of who to shop with and which products to buy. According to KMPG, 56% of customers will take a company’s social and environmental credentials into account when choosing a brand, while other research showed that last year, 28% of UK shoppers abandoned a brand because they had concerns about its sustainability.

With climate change and the environment becoming increasingly important subjects that are constantly in the news, expect sustainability to be of growing importance in the marketplace. While regulation pushes companies to make progress, consumer expectancy will pull them, with equal weight, in the same direction. Of course, taking advantage of this in the market means more than just becoming greener – you’ll also need to promote your eco-friendliness to consumers.

5. Trustable shopping

Trust is a critical element of the brand-customer relationship. With the ball firmly in the court of the shopper, brands who want to acquire and retain customers are having to work harder than ever to improve trust.

Trust operates across all strands of an online store’s operations. It begins with delivering on your promises and being upfront, honest and fair when you are unable to keep them – whether that’s delivery times, product quality, customer service or guarantees. Beyond that, it means having transparent (no-hidden extras) pricing, clearly worded and easy to understand terms and conditions, product images and descriptions that are accurate, and genuine product ratings and reviews.

In addition, a trusted company is one that is secure. It uses SSL to encrypt transactions, secures data to protect against data theft, prevents customers’ accounts from being hacked and keeps its website clean so that customers’ devices don’t become infected.

How your web host can help

Meeting the needs and expectations of today’s experience-led shoppers can be challenging. However, underpinning much of it is a reliance on the technology provided by your web host. For example, cloud hosting makes it easier to analyse the data needed for personalisation, while providing the infrastructure required to unify separate systems and deliver omnichannel shopping. Similarly, your host can ensure you have all the resources to improve the loading times of your mobile website and provide a whole range of security tools to protect your systems, data and website. What’s more, at Anteelo, we use the latest power-efficient CPUs and SSDs which provide a far more carbon-friendly way to host your website, making your store more sustainable.

Roundup of Tech and Hosting News

Posted on 16/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Welcome to our latest round-up of news from the tech and hosting world. Here’s what we’ve discovered this month.

Fake Amazon review scam exposed

Thanks to an online data leak, a number of independent businesses that sell products on Amazon have been caught paying customers for fake 5-star reviews. Security outfit, Safety Detectors, uncovered a scam in which vendors contacted consumers, offering to refund them if they purchased a product and gave it a 5-star review. Once the review had been posted, the refund was then paid not via Amazon, but via the consumers’ PayPal accounts.

With the data leak revealing the credentials of around a quarter of a million fake reviewers, most of them in Europe and the US, the scale of the scam was potentially enormous. What’s more, as purchases were actually made, any reviews would have been listed as coming from a verified purchaser. Besides conning genuine customers, it’s also something that can impact the honest vendors on the marketplace.

Facebook advertisers whacked iOS privacy update

Advertisers making use of Facebook’s advanced tracking tools have been thwarted by Apple’s recent iOS14 update. Until recently, the ability to track users’ browsing behaviour has helped Facebook provide its advertisers with highly targeted ads for marketing and remarketing purposes. However, the iOS14 update prevents third-party apps on Apple devices, such as Facebook, from using cookies or other methods of tracking, unless the device owner opts in.

According to a recent study, only 13% of global users have given permission. With millions of Facebook users accessing the site on iPhones, this low figure seriously hampers the ability to put effective advertising strategies in place. With Google also planning to abolish tracking cookies in the near future, online advertising looks set for a period of significant upheaval.

Bank’s big data cloud project

In a project that could only happen using cloud tech, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is setting up a data insights platform to help its organisational clients deliver better products and services for their own customers.

The project will make use of all the transactional data gathered by the bank which, after being cleansed of identifying data, can be used by its new range of AI-powered tech, automated decision-making tools. With the bank handling more transactional data than any other in Australia, it will give its clients unprecedented access to insights that will help them to react quickly to the evolving needs and expectations of their customers and changes in the market, while enabling them to launch new products swiftly.

Ransomware vendors get a conscience

We’ve long been used to big brands and personalities changing their stance on something after being humbled by a Twitter backlash. It’s not, however, something you’d expect from a ransomware gang – until now. The storm of protest that followed DarkSide’s attack on the Colonial Pipeline in the US, an act that closed 5,500 miles of pipeline and left the east coast without fuel, has caused the cybercriminal gang to adopt an entirely more contrite approach.

In an apology published online, the outfit has promised to issue all its victims with decryption keys and pay them compensation for their losses. What’s more, it has closed down its Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) operations, ending other gangs’ ability to use its tools to ransom their victims.

Interestingly, the backlash has affected other cybercriminal groups. Another prominent ransomware provider, Babuk, has also ceased operations, changing its focus to naming and shaming corporate wrongdoers, while the XSS cybercrime forum has banned the advertising, promotion and discussion of ransomware on its site.

UK workers lack digital skills

In an age when digital transformation is becoming a necessity for businesses, it comes as something as a surprise that in a tech advanced country like the UK, 77% of employees say they have received no training from their employers in essential digital skills. Indeed, according to a report from FutureDotNow, over 17 million British workers lack the digital skills needed in today’s workplace.

Included in FutureDotNow’s list of essential digital skills are such things as password best practice, data analysis, using cloud storage and identifying phishing emails, as well as basic, everyday tasks like being able to access payslips or book leave online.

With the majority of UK organisations failing to tackle the lack of digital skills, FutureDotNow warns it can have a significant effect on the UK economy, slowing digital transformation, impeding productivity and making companies less competitive than international rivals.

Visit our website for more news, blog posts, knowledge base articles and information on our wide range of hosting news services.

Why Do SMEs Need to Be Digitally Transformed?

Posted on 15/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Digital transformation is just something for big business, right? Erm, no! In fact, it’s not completely true that bigger organisations led the way: many of the early movers were the disrupter startups that were digital from the offset. Indeed, it’s being digital that enabled them to become disruptors and forced their larger competitors to react. Today, as more businesses and consumers shift towards digital technology, it’s more important than ever for SMEs to consider how digital transformation can help them stay relevant and competitive. Here, we’ll examine why.

Reacting to change

Shifting consumer behaviours, the evolution of new ways of working and the constant roll-out of new technologies means SMEs are consistently having to adapt quickly to change. Not only are more consumers moving online; they are demanding digital services that provide better customer experiences. Employees, meanwhile, are increasingly seeking to work with companies that enable them to work flexibly and away from the office. To acquire and keep new customers and talented employees, and keep up with competitors, SMEs need to be able to adopt new technologies quickly, for example, deploying remote working platforms for staff or personalisation engines for customers.

To do this, they need to be agile, and its digital transformation that enables this. In particular, it’s the adoption of cloud technology, an infrastructure that allows companies to deploy new servers and applications instantly and which provides them with all the scalable resources they need to undertake their workloads. Indeed, by migrating to the cloud, SMBs eradicate the need for expensive, in-house infrastructures, making them even more agile and putting them on a level playing field with their larger competitors.

Taking advantage of AI

Artificial intelligence is starting to permeate all areas of business operations and its easy accessibility means it’s increasingly being utilised in all sectors. Today, SMEs can use AI for a myriad of purposes. It can help find better ways to procure products or materials, make industrial processes faster and more efficient, monitor machine and system health, provide data insights that identify new opportunities in the marketplace, streamline logistics, deliver human-like chat conversations with customers and identify risk, whether that’s financial risk or risk to life.

A key element of digital transformation, AI is something most SMEs can gain enormous benefit from. The good news is that adopting AI is no longer the major technological leap it used to be. Its popularity means there is a growing number of both open-source and proprietary AI applications that are designed to integrate with company systems – the majority of which are cloud-based. For SMEs that have migrated to the cloud, such technology is merely a click away.

Cyber defence

Being an SME doesn’t protect a company from cyberattack, nor does it remove the obligation to comply with regulation and ensure that data is safe. For this reason, SMEs need to develop a robust security strategy and put disaster recovery and business continuity plans into place.

Though ransomware attacks grab the headlines, there are various other ways companies can fall victim, such as through hacking, phishing, malware infection and DDoS attack. Data can be stolen, systems taken offline, websites taken control of and money syphoned from company accounts. It’s a serious issue: 60% of companies that fall victim to a cyberattack fold within 6 months.

The growing sophistication of cyberattacks means criminals can now buy ransomware as a service or brute force software with built-in AI. As a result, SMEs need advanced tools to defend against them. The adoption of these tools is also a key element of digital transformation. Providing this level of security in-house, however, is not only expensive but requires expertise and this puts it beyond the means of many SMEs. In the cloud, however, both the expertise and advanced technologies like next-gen firewalls, intrusion and malware prevention, etc., are part of the service. Companies will also find that vendors provide backup, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions to help them recover swiftly should the worst happen.

Data storage

Data is essential for digital transformation as it provides the information that applications need to process in order to deliver improvements. Today, businesses gather huge quantities of data, not just from customers and their online activity, but from the monitoring of machinery, vehicles, IoT devices, LED lighting systems, energy usage, inventory systems and more. For digital transformation to work, finding the right storage solution for all that data is essential.

SMEs will need to centralise data in order to control access, create customer journeys and ensure employees have access to the latest versions of documents and files. As data grows, businesses need expandable storage rather than having to go through the risk or rigmarole of upgrading to a bigger server whenever capacity is low. That storage also needs to be secure. Cloud storage is ultra-fast, can be expanded easily, has security features like encryption and access control, and is more cost-effective than buying dedicated servers. Crucially, being in the cloud, it enables remote workers to access data wherever they have an internet connection.

Conclusion

More SMEs are undergoing digital transformation than ever before. Indeed, to stay agile and adapt to change, it is becoming a necessity rather than an ambition. It is, however, a necessity that brings with it many rewards. The starting point for digital transformation lies in the adoption of cloud technology, as it is cloud infrastructure with its robust security and cost-effective pricing, on which the applications, tools and platforms of digital transformation are best run.

How to Get Business Reviews and Why They’re Valuable

Posted on 14/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Online reviews play an important, dual role for businesses, attracting new customers and helping their websites to rank higher in search engine results. Here we’ll take a closer look at why you need Business reviews; explain the different ways you can get them and show you how to make the most use of them.

Why ratings and reviews are important

The reading of ratings and reviews has become an integral element of today’s shopping experience, especially for online purchases. According to Qualtrix, 92% of B2B buyers and 93% of consumers are influenced by reviews, a figure that rises to 97% for local businesses. Positive reviews help develop trust in businesses or the products they are selling and this leads to increased revenue. Of course, negative Business reviews have the opposite effect. 87% of customers won’t shop with businesses that have an overall rating below 3 stars and 94% have avoided companies because of negative reviews. Those without any reviews don’t fare much better. If customers are left with a choice of a well-reviewed company and one which has no reviews, the well-reviewed firm wins hands-down.

It’s not just customers who take notice of reviews. Google does too. It looks at reviews left on its own site and those from sites it trusts, like Yell, Facebook or Trustpilot, considering both the overall rating and, importantly, the positive or negative sentiment used in written reviews. These are used to help Google rank those businesses in search results, particularly in local searches.

Reviews that count

For reviews to have any benefit, they have to be ones that both customers and search engines can trust. First and foremost, they need to be genuine and believable. They are more trustable when on independent, third-party websites and when the reviewer is a verified purchaser. They are more believable when not every review is 5-star (4.9 is the sweet spot) and when the reviews are continual over a longer period rather than all coming at the same time (which happens if dubious companies buy reviews in bulk). Where there are a lot of 5-star reviews and a lot of 1-star reviews with very little in between, it can look like a company has paid for positive reviews to drown out the negative ones.

5 ways to get more online reviews

1. Ask for them in person

If you are a business that deals face to face with customers and they tell you they are happy with your products and services, there’s nothing wrong with asking them to leave you a review. If you have a particular place where you want them to leave it, like Trustpilot or your Google My Business page, then tell them.

2. Request reviews on your website

Thousands of business do this, often using popups, and for various reasons. For example, some eCommerce stores do this right after the checkout page, looking not for a review of the product but of the customer experience so that future shoppers will know how easy and convenient it is to shop at the site.

3. Send invites by email

Many companies now send out automated, personalised emails inviting customers who have purchased products to leave a review. They’ll even provide a link to the site where they would like you to leave it. It’s simple to set up if you have a mailing list and can help generate a lot of reviews. Some businesses wait for customers to make a repeat purchase before sending out a request, knowing that, as a returning customer, the person is more likely to leave a positive review.

4. Get social media reviews

Social media has long been recognised as a way to extend your brand’s reach, however, by having reviews on your business page, you can also offer independent social proof to convince potential customers just how good you are. What’s more, Google takes notice of these reviews too. You can publicly ask for reviews by publishing a post, or you can be more direct and send personal messages to existing customers or followers.

5. Enable reviews on your website

You can enable website reviews for your business or for individual products that you sell. You can set this up quite easily with a review plugin. All you need then is to ask customers to leave a review, which you can do on your homepage, products pages, checkout page or by email.

How to make the most of your reviews

Reviews left on your own website can be displayed on your homepage or for products on products pages. You can also mention your overall ratings and reviews on third-party sites and link to them. Indeed, some third-party sites even enable you to display a live feed of your current ratings stats on your website which, too, will link directly to your review page on their site. You can also add customer and partner testimonials.

Of course, you don’t just need to show off your good reviews on your website, you can include them in emails and other forms of marketing too.

From an SEO perspective, experts recommend using structured data to mark up ratings and reviews left on your own website as this can help Google identify them clearly as reviews. Doing so can improve the chances of Google considering them when ranking your site and might even lead to ratings being displayed in search result snippets.

Conclusion

With nearly all online consumers now reading reviews and ratings to help them decide which businesses to use and products to buy, getting regular, positive reviews has become increasingly important. Hopefully, this post will help you get more of them and show you how to make the most of them.

Improve your customer experience and get better reviews with fast, reliable and secure web hosting. For more, visit our homepage.

Secret to bridging the analytics software gulf :”Iterative methodology + customized solution, leading to self-service BI”

Posted on 13/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

The world of software development and IT services have operated through well-defined requirements, scope and outcomes. 25 years of experience in software development have enabled IT services company to significantly learn and achieve higher maturity. There are enough patterns and standards that one can leverage in-order to avoid scope-creep and make on-time delivery and quality a reality. This world has a fair order.

It is quite contrary to the Analytics world we operate in. Analytics as an industry itself is a relatively new kid on the block. Analytical outcomes are usually insights generated from historical data viz. a viz. descriptive and inquisitive analysis. With the advent of machine learning, the focus is gradually shifting towards predictive and prescriptive analysis. What usually takes months or weeks in software development usually takes just days in the Analytics world. At best, this chaotic world posits the need for continuous experimentations.

The question enterprises need to ask is “how to leverage the best of both worlds to achieve the desired outcomes?”, “how do we bridge this analytics-software chasm?”

The answers require a fundamental shift in perception and approach towards problem solving and solution building. The time to move from what is generally a PPTware (in the world of analytics) to dashboards and furthermore a robust machine learning platform for predictive and prescriptive analyses needs to be as short as possible. The market is already moving towards this said purpose in the following ways:

Data Lakes – These are on-premise and built mostly with the amalgamation of open source technologies and existing COST software’s – homegrown approach that provides single unified platform for rapid experimentation on data along with capability to move quickly towards scaled solutions
Data Cafes / Hubs – Cloud-based SAAS-based approach that allows everything from data consolidation, analysis to visualizations
Custom niche solutions that serve specific purpose

Over a series of blogs, we will explore the above approaches in detail. These blogs will give you an understanding of how integrated and inter-operable systems rapidly allow you to take your experiments towards scaled solutions, in matter of days and in a collaborative manner.

The beauty and the beast are finally coming together!

WHAT’S NEW IN SOLUTIONS?

Posted on 12/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Dell, HP, IBM have all tried to transform themselves from being box sellers to solution providers. Then, in the world of Uber, many traditional products are fast mutating into a service. At Walmart, it is no longer about grocery shopping. Their pick and go service tries to understand more about your journey as a customer, and grocery shopping is just one piece of the puzzle.

There’s a certain common thread that run across all three examples. And it’s about how to break through the complexity of your end customer’s life. Statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence can’t maketh the life of store managers at over 2000 Kroger stores across the country any simpler. It sounds way too complex.

Before I get to the main point, let me belabor a bit and humor you on other paradigms floating around. Meta software, Software as a Service, cloud computing, Service as a Software… Err! Did I just go to randomgenerator dot com and get those names out? I swear I did not.

The cliché in the recent past has been about how industries are racing to unlock the value of big data and create big insights. And with this herd mentality comes all the jargons in an effort to differentiate. Ultimately, it is about solving problems.

In the marketplace abstraction of problem solving, there’s a supply side and a demand side.

The demand side is an overflowing pot of problems. Driven by accelerating change, problems evolve really fast and newer ones keep popping up. Across Fortune 500 firms, there are very busy individuals and teams running businesses the world over, grappling with these problems. Ranging from store managers in a retail store, to trade promotion manager in a CPG firm, a district sales manager in a pharma firm, a decision engineer in a CPG firm and so on. For these individuals, time is a very precious commodity. Analytics is valuable to them only when it is actionable.

On the supply side, there are complex math (read algorithms), advanced technology and smart people to interpret the complexities. And, for the geek in you, this is a candy store situation. But, how do we make these complex math – machine learning, AI and everything else – actionable?

To help teams/individuals embrace the complexity and thrive in it, nature has evolved the concept of solutions. Solutions aim to translate the supply side intelligence into simple visual concepts. This approach takes intelligence to the edge, thereby scaling decision making.

So, how do solutions differ from products, from meta-software, service as a software and the gibberish?

Fundamentally, a solution is meant to exist as a standalone atomic unit – with a singular purpose of making the lives of decision makers easy and simple. It is not created to scale creation of analytics.
For example a solution created to detect anomalies in pharmacy billing will be designed to do just that. The design of this solution will not be affected by the efficiency motivation to apply it to a fraud detection problem as well. Because the design of a solution is driven by the needs of the individual dealing with the problem, it should not be driven by the motivation to scale the creation of analytics. Rather, it should be driven by the motivation to scale the consumption of analytics; to push all the power of machine learning and AI to the edge.

In Anteelo you have a partner who can execute the entire analytical value chain and deliver a solution at the end. No more running to the IT department with a deck/SAS/R/Python code, asking them to create a technology solution. Read more about our offerings here.

Making Change Management Work for You

Posted on 11/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

– Alvin Toffler

“Times have changed.” We’ve heard this statement ever so often. Generations have used it to exclaim “things are so complicated (or simple) these days,” or expressing disdain – “oh, so they think they are a cool” generation. Whichever way you exclaim, change has been truly the “constant”.

This change is bolstered by a tech-enabled world where the speed at which machines are learning is accelerating – the speed of light.

Let me set this in context with an example from the book of Sales. Unlike in the past, today sales reps are not gauged by the amount of sweat trickling down their foreheads. While they continue to be evaluated in terms of business development and lead conversions, it is not all manual and laborious. Technology advancements have made the process of identifying, prioritizing, scheduling, conversing and converting agile and real-time.

But just knowing change, gathering data and appreciating technology will not suffice. The three will need to be blended seamlessly to yield transformation. Applied to deeper organizational context, “Change” needs to be interpreted – its pace needs to be matched, or even better, its effect needs to be contextualized for differentiation.

Change management in this sense is the systematization of the entire process; right from the acceptance of change to its adoption and taking advantage of it to thrive in volatile times.

But what would it take for complex enterprises, that swear by legacy systems, to turbo charge into the Change Management mode?

To answer this, I will humanize enterprise change management with the Prosci-developed ADKAR Model.

Awareness (getting into the race) – Where can I set up the next retail store, what is the most optimal planogram, how do I determine the right marketing mix, what is my competition doing different, how do I improve customer experience, how do I ensure sales force effectiveness – the questions are ample. By the time you realize and start strategizing, a competitor has dislodged your market position and eaten a large portion of your pie. And while these business problems seem conventional, volatility in the marketplace cry foul. Compound this with high dependencies on dashboards, applications, and the likes for insights, and you’ve seen the side-effects – established enterprises biting the dust.

To survive, organizations will need to be knowledgeable about data that matter viz a viz the noise. They will need to interpret the data deluge in relevance and context; after all, not all data is diamond.

Desire (creating a business case for adoption) – Desire is a basic human instinct. Our insatiable urge to want something more, even better, accentuates this instinct. When it comes to enterprises, this desire is no different; to stay ahead of the curve, to make more profits, to be leaders. But there is no lock-and-key fix to achieve this mark. Realizing corporate “desire” will require a cultural and mindset shift across the organization – top-down. And so, one of the most opportune times could be when there are changes at the leadership, followed by re-organization in the rungs below.

Gamification could be a great starting point to drive adoption in such cases. Allow the scope of experimentation to creep in; invest consciously in simmer projects; give a freehand to analysts to look for the missing piece of the puzzle outside their firewall; incentivize them accordingly. Challenge business leaders to up their appreciation for the insights generated, encourage them to get their hands down and dirty when it comes to knowing their source, ask the right questions and challenge status quo – not just rely on familiarity and past experiences.

Knowledge and Ability (From adoption to implementation) – In business context, “desire” typically translate into business goals – revenue, process adoption, automation, newer market expansion, launch of a new product/solution, etc. Mere awareness of the changes taking place does not translate into achievements. It needs to be studied and change management needs to be initiated.

But how can you execute your day job and learn to change?

The trick here will be to make analytics seamless; almost second nature. Just as the message alert from the bank about any suspicious transaction made on your account, any deviation from the set course of business action needs to be alerted.

Such technology-assisted decisions are the need of today and the future. Tredence CHA solution is an example in this direction. It is intuitive, convenient and evolving, mirroring aspects of Robotics Process Automation (RPA).

Reinforcement (Stickiness will be key) – Your business problems are yours to know and yours to solve. Like my colleague mentioned in his blog, a one size fits all solution does not exist. Solving the business challenges of today requires going to the root cause of it, understanding the data sources available to you, and being knowledgeable about other data combinations (across the firewall or within) that matter. Match this stream of data with relevant tools and techniques that can give you the “desired” results.

Point to keep in mind during this drill is to ensure that you marry the old and new. Replacing a legacy system with something totally new could leave a bad taste in your mouth – with less adoption and greater resistance. Embedded analytics will be key – one that allows you to seamlessly time travel between the past, present and future.

To conclude, whether it is about time to implement change, improving customer service, reducing inefficiencies, or mitigating the negative effect of volatile markets, Change Management will be pivotal. It is a structured, on-going process to ensure you are not merely surviving, rather thriving in change.

What are app containers?

How are containers useful?

Additional benefits of containers

A well-established technology

Would app containers be useful for my company?

Conclusion

1. Cut costs

2. Everywhere accessibility

3. Better parents’ evenings

4. Real-time data – on tap

5. Cut the costs of print and paper (financially and environmentally)

6. Personalised environments

Conclusion

1. Instant loading and response

2. A slick design

3. Reduce the clicks

4. Product pages that are actually useful

5. Product reviews

6. Personalisation

Conclusion

1. Personalised shopping

2. Omnichannel shopping

3. Mobile shopping

4. Sustainable shopping

5. Trustable shopping

How your web host can help

Fake Amazon review scam exposed

Facebook advertisers whacked iOS privacy update

Bank’s big data cloud project

Ransomware vendors get a conscience

UK workers lack digital skills

Reacting to change

Taking advantage of AI

Cyber defence

Data storage

Conclusion

Why ratings and reviews are important

Reviews that count

5 ways to get more online reviews

1. Ask for them in person

2. Request reviews on your website

3. Send invites by email

4. Get social media reviews

5. Enable reviews on your website

How to make the most of your reviews

Conclusion

In the marketplace abstraction of problem solving, there’s a supply side and a demand side.

So, how do solutions differ from products, from meta-software, service as a software and the gibberish?

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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Contact

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India (HQ)

Atlanta

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Dubai

Australia

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Take a look at our global hideouts.