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5 Stages to a Successful Cloud-based SaaS Application Migration

Posted on 18/02/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

A digital transformation can deliver improved flexibility, faster speed-to-market and reduced costs, but only if you go about things in the right way. One path to a successful digital transformation is to move traditional applications to cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, a migration that requires a data-driven approach and using technology in strategic, new ways.

Traditionally, most business application migrations start with business process reengineering, whiteboard sessions, offsite process walk-throughs, process mapping and so on. All these are fine, but to achieve success, you need to take a fresh, data-driven approach that focuses on fact-based views of current processes and lays out non-biased options.

A data-driven approach that uses advanced technologies, such as machine learning and predictive intelligence, can provide opportunities to reduce costs, improve quality and boost innovation. These five steps can help you successfully migrate legacy applications to a cloud-based SaaS environment:

1. Establish a digital baseline. Before implementing SaaS, you should deploy data-discovery tools to identify the current state of business processes and build a digital blueprint of all baseline activities. Tools such as Hadoop, Spark and Google TensorFlow can be used to construct machine-generated process maps, automated metrics calculations, and intelligent “hot spot” analysis. This will show what process area need to be fixed and where the fixes should be applied.

2. Simplify and standardize. Once the digital baseline is in place, the next step is to simplify and standardize. This can be done analyzing each process area that has been customized and comparing them with modern best practices, while leveraging modern technologies including cloud, mobile, analytics, social, Internet of Things, and big data. This helps you visualize future state processes, identify process-improvement opportunities, and mitigate risks with the right organizational change management approaches and training strategies.

3. Deploy diverse migration tools. The path to SaaS migration relies on process discovery, rapid deployments and automation. Enterprises should deploy a wide array of migration and testing tools to perform extracts, upload setups and master data. Once deployed, you should engage in end-to-end automated functional testing of applications and other critical tasks.

4. Closely monitor the migration. Be prepared to generate detailed reports and dashboards that allow you to review configuration uploads to ensure they are all loaded, verifying that they are correct and supported. Testing is also key – you should establish a test repository with assets such as scenario descriptions, test scripts and user-configurable workbooks, and provision testing-as-a-service (TaaS) to reduce testing time and costs.

5. Automate and optimize. After your migration is complete, your focus should turn to automation and optimization. For example, you can use data from pre- and post-migration to identify candidates for automation to make sure your digital workforce (bots) is executing each automation step as planned. Also, your organization can drive continuous innovation and improvement via lean methods to optimize workflows and team performance.

Successfully migrating to cloud-based SaaS applications involves changing your business, your processes and even your people across the enterprise. A data-driven approach is effective only when technology, people, and talent – business and IT, along with leadership – are integrated with the right balance to execute cohesively with a clearly defined end goal in mind.

Designing systems for machines rather than people: Latest Tech Trend.

Posted on 08/02/202014/06/2021 by Tushar

For businesses to be agile and respond quickly to changing market conditions, they need to provide business users with real-time and near-time operational data. That means harnessing data from devices and tackling the latency challenge. In 2020, we will see more organisations shift their design thinking from services and systems for people to services and systems for machines. The move to machine-to-machine (M2M) systems also means processing is moving to the network edge, where the data is.

Action at the edge

Organisations are experimenting with extending data clusters to the edge to reduce latency, gain operational efficiencies and improve products and services. Fast food company Chick-fil-A is running Kubernetes on 6,000 kitchen devices in all 2,000 of its restaurants. This is part of the chain’s internet of things (IoT) strategy to collect and analyze more data to improve throughput, operational efficiency and, most of all, customer service.

The move to M2M dovetails with the notion of catering to local markets using local data. This will foster new design architectures that take into account privacy, security and regulatory concerns regarding the “frame of reference” of data — i.e., the notion of localised data being more valuable than global data in terms of its usability and mining. When organisations consider modernizing their IT operations and changing the way microservices are deployed — especially large multinationals with a wide global reach — it becomes critical for them to consider the advantages of targeting a geography locally, and realizing that there are new tools and ways of doing this.

Another facet driving the change in design thinking is the need to make maximum use of computing resources. Whereas the decision frequency of a person ranges between 1-15 hertz, which means that people can decipher information and make a decision in about ½-1 second, today’s microprocessors can operate at gigahertz and process information in nanoseconds. If these processors are not operating as fast as they can, they are just space eaters. Organisations want to keep their processors as busy as possible, which means designing for billions of decisions or operations per second. Otherwise, they may end up paying for unused capacity.

Signs of M2M

Two examples of M2M architecture are SAP Leonardo and KubeEdge. Through SAP Leonardo intelligent technologies and capabilities, SAP is integrating its ERP applications with IoT platforms, combining traditional IT services with M2M capabilities. Importantly, SAP can address broader markets than niche IoT platforms.

KubeEdge, built on Kubernetes, is an open source platform for building edge computing solutions that extend to the cloud. The platform supports network, application deployment and metadata synchronization between the cloud and edge. It extends the Kubernetes ecosystem from cloud to edge and provides benefits such as lower latency, low resource consumption and applications at the edge that can run in offline mode.

The road ahead

We are starting to observe a shift in IT design from IT for humans to IT for machines. These design patterns deliver richer experiences because they enable substantially more processing in the same experience time. Design shifts will lead to changes in batch processing and stream processing architectures, which are constantly being updated and reimagined with better M2M capabilities. Data and analytics will continue moving to the edge where the machines are, to analyze the massive influx of IoT data and provide maximum throughput with minimum latency. Rapid deployments of these transformational architectures may not be immediate, but over time these new architectures will be a forcing function for IT modernization.

Teams, not individuals, are the greatest achievers in Technology.

Posted on 07/02/202014/06/2021 by Tushar

Developing high-performing teams will be the focus of many enterprises in 2020. Companies will confront the fallacy that pace is what unlocks the company’s full potential and recognize that how the company organizes its people and information flow is what determines performance.

Organizing for a dynamic and complex environment requires a much different structure than the traditional command-and-control pyramid. Talent acquisition and development strategies must be built on a team-of-teams approach consisting of multidimensional individuals, rather than traditional siloed teams consisting of single subject matter experts. Put differently, the focus shifts from developing so-called 10x individuals to developing 20x teams.

Lessons from the battlefield

The transformation of the battlefield and the U.S. military’s adaptation offers an excellent case study, specifically the experience in Ramadi, Iraq. The unpredictability and dynamic conditions of the battlefield are similar to the current business environment: combating insurgents who utilize asymmetrical tactics and are well equipped with the latest technology, while having to maintain and grow the customer base (citizenry).

The “clear, hold and build” strategy that worked in Ramadi revealed that capabilities such as raids had been elevated to the level of strategy. Modern business has done something similar by elevating the increase in pace, agile and DevOps capabilities to strategy. However, merely holding meetings more frequently and in a different manner falls short of desired results. What companies need, as the military learned, is more flexible joint power from multidimensional teams that provide multiple options in the face of volatility, rather than the limited options of a traditional pyramid of teams.

As retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal explains in Team of Teams, the military in Iraq needed to be not only efficient but also adaptable. It became a priority to focus on reconfiguring to be able to deal with volatility quickly. Simply deploying more resources and putting more people to work, to become more efficient in the current operating model, was not enough. As McChrystal points out, the traditional pyramid constrains team productivity due to choke points, ineffective communication channels, stifled creativity and inadequate response time.

So the military created linkages between teams, put people from different service branches and agencies on the same team, and shared information widely so everyone understood the larger mission and could make decisions accordingly. McChrystal understood that “technology had changed in such a way that management had become a limfac [limiting factor].”

The same is true in today’s business environment, where an explosion of technological progress — improved capabilities to track, measure and predict via big data and advanced analytics; moonshot projects; and unconventional business models — has created a more interdependent, fast-paced and complex business environment. In this environment, companies need interconnected multidimensional teams that can adapt and scale.

The new teams

The new interconnected teams have diverse skills that capitalize on the team’s collective intelligence and increase a team’s productivity. The shared sense of purpose and mentoring that occurs within the team not only strengthens the relationships and performance but also mitigates knowledge gaps between senior and junior employees.

Populate these teams with double-deep personnel and now you have the ability to scale across the company, purposefully cross training your people to fill gaps. This creates a natural talent pipeline. Rotating people through different teams means employees advance through project-based promotions and team assignments rather than the traditional subjective requirements.

In order to be effective and maximize the potential of these multifaceted teams, they need to be empowered to make decisions. This does not mean they operate totally on their own, but they “have implicit trust that their senior leaders will back their decisions,” as Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin point out in Extreme Ownership. With proper decentralized command, teams that are closest to the situation can execute in a manner that supports the overarching goal without having to ask for permission.

In 2020 leaders will determine how to, in the words of McChrystal, “scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations” amidst the chaos of ongoing business transformation. Ultimately, building better teams will build better individuals and enterprises. The ability to develop and lead a network of high-performing teams will be key to business success in the post-digital age.

Business continuity with a remote workforce-Checklist

Posted on 06/02/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Whether dealing with the current coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis or anticipating a future natural disaster, organizations need to prepare for emergencies that require employees to suddenly switch from a corporate environment to a home office. Even once the crisis arrives, organizations might have to drastically adjust their plans to address the scale required. Continuity plans must encompass not only the technology required to keep the business up and running but also the human aspect — making sure employees are well-trained and prepared to work remotely. As the size of the remote workforce suddenly increases, here is a checklist for IT leaders to consider when tackling the technology piece of the puzzle:

Network capacity planning: Conduct a capacity analysis to determine whether internet bandwidth is sufficient to handle the increased WAN traffic that occurs when large numbers of employees access the network. Additional items on the capacity planning checklist include firewalls, VPNs, and other remote access-related technologies that might be overwhelmed by the increased volume of traffic coming from outside of corporate headquarters.

Security monitoring: Intensify activities designed to detect and prevent attacks. Hackers are likely to take this opportunity to increase malicious activities. “Secure the Human” training can be delivered remotely to ensure that employees remember the organization’s security practices.

Identity and access management: Beef up identity and access management for remote workers through methods such as multifactor authentication.

Data protection: Ensure that security is extended and corporate data is encrypted to prevent the unintentional or malicious exposure of sensitive data.

VPNs: Make sure that VPN agents are installed on every device that connects to the corporate network to provide secure remote access.
Devices: Prepare for a shortage of devices to support the growing number of remote workers. Have a contingency purchase plan as well as a template for quickly configuring the device and loading the appropriate software.
Bring your own device (BYOD): Consider BYOD as supply chains are strained and the ability to get the needed hardware to employees becomes increasingly difficult. Using a cloud-based portal, employees can self-register their devices and download VPNs and other security tools, with the ability to segregate corporate data from personal information.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): Consider deploying a thin client architecture for remote workers as another option. However, upfront planning is required to make sure the thin clients are available and that the back-end server infrastructure is in place to support the thin client model.

Collaboration: Provide strong communication and collaboration capabilities to help keep employees productive and engaged. Organizations may want to look at videoconferencing tools to compensate for the lack of face time to help employees feel more connected. Collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Office 365 with Teams activated and G Suite, as well as videoconferencing services such as Zoom, are providing new ways of working, connecting and collaborating. Training employees on how to conduct work in these virtual spaces is critical.

Omnichannel support: Be prepared for a significant volume increase for IT support. Some employees may have been abruptly moved to a remote access environment, while others may now find themselves with new devices, software or tools they have never used before. And as a remote working model typically provides increases in flexibility, spikes in support needs may not follow the traditional patterns of regular business hours. The IT department needs to be prepared to offer omnichannel and remote support, including video options for face-to-face communications. Of course, service desk employees may themselves be working remotely, so pay special attention to make sure they have the capacity and the tools to respond to service desk issues from their home offices. Proactive and predictive analytics tools, combined with an easy-to-use support portal, can drastically reduce the calls to a strained service desk for rudimentary problems.

As we all know, even the best-laid plans don’t always work perfectly. In the midst of a global crisis, organizations might find that their business continuity plans haven’t accounted for an unprecedented level of scale, urgency, capacity and employee needs. In these instances, organizations should stay in close contact with their preferred vendors. There is no need to go it alone when expert help and support are available.

Unexpected challenges can cause maximum disruption to people’s lives and to business. The way in which we mitigate risks to ease the strain on businesses and their employees will ensure an organization’s ability to continue into the future.

Criterias to Consider When Choosing an Email Hosting Provider

Posted on 02/06/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

For business communications, your first choice of getting in touch is likely to be email. It’s quick, easy and unlike the many messaging apps, everybody has it. You can send it internally and externally, attach documents or add links and use it for all manner of purposes. For a business, an own-domain email address is essential. However, while there are plenty of email services you can use, not all of them are the same. Here, we’ll explain what things you need to look for when finding a business emailhosting provider.

1. Security

As virtually everyone has an email address, email has become a popular tool for cybercriminals. Aside from the mountain of spam that can clog up your inbox and waste hours of your employees’ time, emails are used to defraud, to phish, to spread malware and to ransom computers. For businesses, not only is there the threat that comes from receiving, opening and acting on these emails, there is also the potential of unknowingly passing on malware to recipients, including your customers, from an infected computer. In addition, some cybercriminals may send fake emails in your company’s name to try and scam your customers.

All of these threats can have damaging consequences for your business and its reputation; that’s why you need solutions that will minimise the security risks. These include email scanning and filtering tools that detect spam, phishing and malware, preventing them from arriving in your inbox and stopping infected emails being unwittingly sent. Also, look for emailsigning certificates that both verify the legitimacy of your outgoing emails to customers and secure its contents, including attachments, by encryption. You should also look for email backup services that ensure your communications are never lost and can be easily restored.

For businesses that need to comply with regulations like GDPR and ISO, you may want to consider enterprise-level email. This detects, alerts and blocks sensitive content from being sent, as well as archiving emails and providing powerful auditing tools.

2. Reliability

The sending and receiving of timely communications are vital for companies. When your phone call ends with, ‘I’ll emailit now,’ or your website tells customers, ‘Check your inbox’, most people will sit waiting for the delivery. When it doesn’t happen, it leads to disappointment and sometimes to the loss of business. Companies cannot afford their emails to be hosted on unreliable servers that frequently go down. As a minimum, you should look for a guaranteed 99% uptime and, if needed, choose enterprise email that offers 100% uptime.

3. Accessibility

Whether you are sending or receiving, email should be easy. You should be able to access it in the office or on the go, on computers or mobile devices and via both web portals and email clients such as Outlook. You should also have the option of using both Pop3 and IMAP access. What’s more, your email should be synced so that everything is available on all devices.

Make sure that your hosting provides the level of accessibility your business needs, especially if you have remote employees who need to send and receive away from the office.

4. More than just email

Email services should do much more than let you send and receive communications. They should also provide you with the ability to manage your contact lists, calendars and tasks, share files securely and fully integrate with clients like Outlook. This valuable suite of features makes it easier for your business to communicate and for employees to collaborate and manage their schedules or projects.

5. Adequate storage

Whether it’s for compliance or future reference, many of the emails we receive, together with their attachments, will be kept in our inboxes or archives. Over time, the amount of storage you will need increases, especially if you regularly send or receive large attachments.

It is important, therefore, that you choose a provider that offers email packages with gradually increasing storage. This means, as your storage needs grow, you can upgrade to a larger package without having to migrate your email to a new host.

6. Enough email addresses for your needs

Even very small companies often need multiple email addresses, some for individuals, some for departments (e.g. sales@) or some for specific purposes (e.g. info@ or newsletter@). You will often find various options available from email providers; at Anteelo, for example, our packages range from a single email address to unlimited addresses, so as your company grows, you can upgrade when it is appropriate to do so. Make sure you choose a host that provides packages which offer you enough addresses for your current needs and the flexibility to grow.

7. Easy management

Another consideration is the ease at which you can manage your email service, carrying out such tasks as adding or deleting email addresses or configuring your account settings. The quality of the control panel you use for this purpose is key. Control panels like cPanel and Plesk are ideal for this purpose, enabling you to manage your email from the same interface as you run your website and offering a suite of tools to improve the email service. cPanel, for example, can compress email on delivery, helping minimise the amount of storage you need.

8. 24/7 technical support

As email is essential, it is critical that, should you encounter any problems or need assistance, support is available 24/7. Check carefully that your email provider offers technical support, not just customer service, so that you can be confident an expert can help you out there and then.

Conclusion

Businesses rely on emails to deliver their services. Being almost universally used, they are necessary for both internal and external communications. Choosing the right email hosting solution is crucial to ensure you have a secure, reliable and fully featured service that is accessible, flexible and easy to manage.

Emerging trends in Cloud Computing

Posted on 10/05/201910/06/2021 by Tushar

Barriers to enterprise adoption of cloud computing including security concerns and regulatory compliance continue to crumble. As new cloud computing capabilities mature, such as support for containers and serverless computing, multi-cloud environments are becoming the platform of choice for innovation and digital transformation.

Cloud computing, a fundamental component of the digital trends affecting businesses today, will continue to grow in 2019, driven by these key trends:

Edge computing is on the rise

The proliferation of IoT devices and the need for organizations to deliver near real-time services based on advanced data analytics is pushing the action out to the network edge. The explosion of data at multiple edge locations has profound implications for data management, hybrid cloud models and digital technologies such as machine learning and AI. Sending data collected at the edge back to a single public cloud or to an enterprise data center for processing is ineffective because companies need to be able to make fast decisions as close to the data sources as possible in order to minimize analytics latency.

Multi-cloud management becomes an imperative

In an edge computing world, companies must embrace a multi-cloud strategy in which compute power and analytics capabilities exist in multiple locations but are managed seamlessly across the enterprise landscape so there is no interruption in producing the business results the company needs. Functions such as security, governance and auditing need to run across all platforms, but there are other operations that are better managed within individual clouds, so companies need to sort that out and draw clear lines.

Data management gains new importance

As data becomes increasingly distributed due to the requirements of edge computing, data management across multiple clouds becomes critical. Companies need to understand where the data is located, who has access to it, and how it needs to be processed throughout the data lifecycle.

Regulatory compliance impacts infrastructure

The full ramifications of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will be felt in 2019 and are expected to have a significant impact on how companies handle and secure data that falls under regulatory scrutiny. This affects edge and cloud data and requires companies to re-think their data management and data control systems. However, the barriers to running highly regulated applications in the cloud are evaporating and many companies are finding they can meet even these tighter compliance and security standards in a multi-cloud environment.

Data centers continue declines

As more and more workloads move to the cloud — even crown-jewel, mission-critical applications such ERP software — the pressure builds to close enterprise data centers altogether. There will always be some workloads that have to run in an on-premises environment. But companies can move those workloads to a co-location facility that features high-speed, low-latency connections to the cloud to maximize data integration, so companies can still shutter their data center without impacting the business.

Modern operating platform adoption grows

Organizations that simply lifted and shifted existing applications to the cloud are now taking advantage of maturing approaches like serverless computing and containerization to re-factor their applications for a cloud-native environment. While there is still some apprehension as organizations try to figure out the best way to benefit from these new approaches, companies will see a real payoff in application optimization on these new platforms in 2019.

DevOps and security merge

Increasingly, security best practices will be codified into the application development tooling pipeline. In a DevSecOps scenario, security is baked into the agile development process via automated systems. On the operations side, companies will benefit from the improved monitoring and increased visibility provided by cloud service companies. In fact, it is difficult to argue today that a small or mid-size company has better security than cloud providers who have made security a top priority. And third-party cloud-based providers will use machine learning to offer security services like threat detection-as-a-service.

High-performance computing moves to the cloud

There have always been some specialized, high-performance applications that organizations were reluctant to run in the cloud. But cloud providers have built high-performance, GPU-based systems that are now allowing organizations to migrate niche, high-performance applications, thus making it easier to shutter their data centers.

Cloud computing was once associated with shadow IT or with apps that could be opportunistically migrated, but in 2019 we will see multi-cloud environments emerging as strategic platforms for driving innovation.

The Top 10 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Trends To Drive More Traffic

Posted on 08/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Although most website owners are aware that SEO is essential if they want their site to rank well in search engine results, keeping up to date with the ways in which SEO should be done and then putting it into practice can be a time-consuming task. Search engines are constantly refining their algorithms in order to produce ever better results for their users and this means the Search Engine Optimization goalposts are constantly on the move. To help you stay up to date, here are the latest major developments in search engine optimization.

Optimising for search intent

Search engines’ main priority is to give users the content they want to find. Doing this means they are using more sophisticated ways to understand the intent of the user when they carry out a search. When someone types in ‘paracetamol’, for example, the search engine will try to work out whether they are looking to buy paracetamol or whether they want to find information about it. This might seem impossible from a one-word search; however, by using all the information they have on that user, recent search history, browsing habits and so forth, and by comparison to other users, their incredibly sophisticated algorithms can ascertain intent to a far better degree.

What does this mean for website optimisation? It means you have to undertake a new form of keyword research looking for the intent of users when they use the keywords you want to rank for. Only when you understand what their intent is (to buy, to find information, etc.) can you create the content to match. Indeed, you should do this for all the content on your site, not just the things you publish in the future.

Redefining domain authority

Domain authority has always been based on the quality of the content that a website provides. Once upon a time, search engines’ main measure of this was by the number of reputable websites that linked to it. Quality backlinks were priority number one.

Today, as search engines find more sophisticated ways to judge the quality of the content, the emphasis is on, to quote Google, ‘identifying pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness on a given topic.’ Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, often referred to by the acronym EAT, are therefore the new main priority when it comes to domain authority.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means your content has to illustrate expertise in your field and that any posts you publish need to be accredited to someone within your organisation with authority in that area, preferably people who can prove their trustworthiness by having their expertise mentioned on other leading websites (an actual link is not necessary). In other words, even if you have someone else write the content, the author by-line needs to be attributed to a recognised expert. Indeed, going much further, the website as a whole should be seen to specialise in its chosen topic.

Do backlinks still really matter? Yes – as long as they are from quality sites relevant to your own area. They help with what is known as PageRank and are taken by search engines as proof that the information your site provides is trustworthy.

Optimising for image searches

Image searches have begun to take off in a big way and websites which haven’t yet begun to optimise for them should do so. Why? Because tech native generations find it very user-friendly to take a picture of something rather than type in a search term and with Google Lens being able to identify over a billion items already, the technology is increasingly being used.

Websites should make sure that every image has a filename that reflects its subject matter (IMG001.jpg won’t suffice) and an alt-tag that describes the picture. Aside from that, domain authority is also a key factor in whether your images will be ranked. A picture of an owl from the RSPB will likely rank higher than one a blogger has taken on a day trip to an owl sanctuary. More up to date photos from sites that regularly post fresh content will also rank better, especially if the photograph is a featured image on a page.

Optimising for voice searches

The growth of Google’s Search Assistant and the increasing numbers of Google Home devices means Google, in particular, is increasingly focussed on voice search. Chances are, it will be difficult for your content to feature in spoken search results, as Google will prioritise the top ranking sites. However, to give your content a better chance, you should consider putting questions and answers in your content, and to frame the questions in the way someone would ask them when speaking out loud.

As Google uses featured snippets in its voice search results, this is another area where you should concentrate. In particular, you need to include keywords in the snippet and these should be keywords that the page actually ranks for. In other words, if there are keywords you want to rank for but don’t, don’t use these in the snippet unless they are part of a long-tail keyphrase.

Conclusion

Doing well in organic searches is getting increasingly harder, especially as even the top results now get pushed aside by adverts, answer boxes and lists of related questions. Because of this, the developments in Search Engine Optimization mentioned here are all the more important to help you rank better. Hopefully, you will find the information of value to you.

If you are looking for faster website loading to improve your SEO, check out our wide range of high-performance hosting solutions.

7 Exceptionally Effective Online Business Management Tools

Posted on 07/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Though there is a lot of work involved in creating and managing an online business, there are plenty of useful tools around to help you do things quicker, smarter and more easily. Today, there are applications and services, many of them free to use, which can help you do everything from building professional standard websites and eCommerce stores, to ensuring you’re well prepared for the worst kind of emergencies. Here, we’ll look at seven of the most useful.

1. WordPress

WordPress is the perfect tool for creating fully functioning, professional websites. This completely free CMS platform has been used to create 35% of the world’s websites and has been developed over many years to make it easy for anyone with basic computer skills to use.

What’s more, with thousands of free themes and tens of thousands of free plugins, WordPress users can create websites that are uniquely designed and which have unparalleled functionality compared to other website creation software. With it, you can build any kind of website and have it perform any kind of function. The sheer scope of its plugins gives any website enormous potential.

If that’s not enough, its massive popularity means that beginners have a vast range of online support to help them with any issues, with many websites and web hosts offering specialist support in all areas of its use.

2. WooCommerce

If your main purpose is to sell products or services online, then you will need to create an eCommerce store. The ultimate tools for doing this is WooCommerce, which is actually a WordPress plugin rather than a standalone program. Essentially, once you have created your WordPress website, all you need to do is install and activate the free WooCommerce plugin and your site is transformed into an eCommerce store. All you have to do then is set up the store and add the products (physical or digital) or services (including bookings and reservations) that you want to offer.

WooCommerce is a user-friendly plugin that helps you manage sales, inventory, payment and delivery. It is so popular; it is one of the few WordPress plugins to have its own set of plugins. These provide additional functionality to enhance the customer experience and to make it easier for you to manage your store.

3. PersonalSign

Many people fall victim to online scams like phishing because they are unable to tell the difference between a genuine email and one which scammers have tried to make look authentic. PersonalSign is an email signing certificate that puts a stop to this by letting recipients of your emails quickly verify that it is trustworthy. Additionally, the contents of your email and any attachments you send are encrypted, preventing them being stolen or tampered with during transit or at rest.

PersonalSign isn’t just of benefit to your customers, either. Many businesses fall victim to phishing because employees receive fake emails purporting to come from executives in their own company – often asking for money to be transferred to the scammers’ account or asking for sensitive data. Email signing certificates put an end to this, too.

4. cPanel hosting

When setting up your online business, one of the first decisions you will need to take is on the type of hosting package tools you wish to use. While there are many different types of hosting to choose from (e.g. shared, VPS, dedicated server or cloud) one of the things you will need to consider is the type of control panel which your hosting will come with.

The control panel is the interface you will use to manage your hosting and your websites. The most common form of hosting uses Linux-based servers and the most popular control panel for Linux is cPanel. cPanel web hosting tools makes it easy to manage your web hosting and email; its user-friendly interface offers simple file management, 1-click application installs and a comprehensive suite of useful tools that enable you to carry out a wide range of management activities. Setting up new domains, automating updates, adding new email addresses, etc., is a breeze with cPanel.

5. Google Analytics

Data has become the backbone of today’s decision-making processes and this is equally true of running a website. Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool, provided by Google, that gives you in-depth data on visitors to your website. Going way beyond telling you how many visitors your website gets, when they visit and where from; GA can be used to track where visitors have found you, which pages they visit, how long they spend on each page and what pages they exit from.

Perhaps most importantly, you can use GA to improve your marketing. You can set up goals to track visitor progress through your sales funnel, including analysing how effectively your ads and other online marketing techniques generate conversions.

What’s more, GA is incredibly easy to set up and integrate with your website. WordPress users can do the integration simply by using a plugin.

6. Yoast SEO

The success of your online venture depends upon the number of visitors you get to your website. Unless you want to rely heavily on paid advertisements, the main way to get visitors is through ranking well in search engine results. Search engine optimisation, however, is a complicated and ongoing process covering everything from site speed and mobile-friendliness to website structure, keyword placement and domain authority.

When it comes to on-site SEO, there is no better tool than the free Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin automatically looks after much of the optimisation you will need to do while providing wizard-like guidance to ensure any content you are creating meets the most up-to-date SEO requirements.

7. Automated remote backups

The final tool you should consider is automated remote backups. A necessity rather than an option, a remote backup is the only fall back you will have if you lose your website data. Should your site be hacked, your server fail, your data be corrupted or even if you accidentally press the delete button, there’s the potential that you could lose the entire content of your website and the website files themselves. Failure to restore your website swiftly can have catastrophic consequences and even put you out of business completely. A remote backup can help you get your site back online quickly.

An automated backup service does more than just back up. It enables you to take backups as frequently as your business needs, it saves the files remotely from your own server, provides enough space for multiple backups and even checks that the backups are not themselves corrupted. You can also encrypt your backups to ensure that you comply with data protection regulations.

Conclusion

There are a huge number of tools you can use to create and manage your websites and it can be challenging to search through them all looking for the best ones. The tools and services we have shown here are those which we think provide great value and are exceptionally useful.

What Exactly Is Digital Transformation, and What Are Its Advantages?

Posted on 05/03/201921/06/2021 by Tushar

Digital transformation puts companies in a far more advantages, giving them all the benefits that the latest technologies bestow. However, while the adoption of new technologies is a key element of the process, deeper changes are needed before an organisation can truly reap the rewards. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what digital transformation is and what it can offer.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation puts companies in a far more advantages . On one level, digital transformation is the process of adopting technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the IoT in order to make business processes more effective and efficient. What makes these technologies particularly beneficial is their ability to gather and process data. This enables companies to be more informed about their processes, strategies and activities while giving them data-driven insights to help with decision-making.

The adoption of these technologies, digital transformation puts companies in a far more advantages however, is not merely something that happens in the data centre or in IT, it brings change to the entire organisation, forcing the company to rethink its goals and strategies, reorganise its structures and roles, and to make changes to processes that affect all its workforce. Indeed, for many companies, some of these changes are often necessary before the process of digital transformation can commence. Key here is the corporate attitude to digital transformation. For it to be successful, the business needs to embrace new technologies and this often requires a shift in company culture.

The driving force behind successful digital transformation is the digital leader. This is someone who clearly knows the technologies needed to transform the company and who understands the changes their deployment will bring. These leaders don’t just have belief in the project, they are also able to communicate that belief in order to bring on the cultural shift that’s required – and that’s not just in the board room; it’s across the whole business.

What are the advantages of digital transformation?

Once the company is ready to embrace new technologies and the changes they will bring, there are numerous benefits that can result. Here are some of the main ones.

Making the most of data

Digitalisation helps break down departmental silos so that data can be unified and more easily analysed. As a result, end to end customer journey mapping is attainable, while other forms of unstructured data can be combined to gain previously unobtainable insights.

Cost savings

While technologies like cloud, with its pay as you go pricing, can significantly reduce IT costs, this is just the tip of the cost-saving iceberg. New technology can help companies optimise a wide range of business processes, providing valuable data to show where efficiencies can be made

Consolidation

Modern digital technologies can transform how a business goes about its operations, helping to streamline its workflows and, in the process, cut employee workloads and reduce overheads.

Creating customer-centric businesses

One of the main benefits of digital transformation is that the data it provides about customers enables businesses to improve the customer experience. From websites that offer personalised products to communications sent at the right time and via the right channel and with the right message, digital transformation enables businesses to deliver experiences that the customer wants.

More attractive products and services

Understanding what the customer wants not only improves the customer experience, it also enables businesses to provide the products and services that the customer is looking for. It helps manufacturers with product design and retailers with inventory selection while enabling other companies to offer services which are more likely to appeal to their customers. As a result, companies become increasingly more effective in the marketplace.

Precise market segmentation

The technology available to digitally transformed businesses enables them to have far more information about their customers, helping them to discover new market segments that, in the past, they would never have been aware of.

Omnichannel customer experiences

Digital technology enables business-wide systems to be put into place so that your customers can interact and buy from you when, where and how they choose, whether that’s online or at your bricks and mortar store.

A more agile and innovative business

The modern technology that digital transformation provides is faster, more powerful and more capable than legacy IT systems. It makes it easier for teams to collaborate and enables businesses to react quickly to market changes. It also speeds up the development and launch of new products, services and strategies.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is not merely the process of deploying new technologies, it’s the adoption of a digital culture that embraces this technology and carefully manages the significant changes that it will bring to the company as a whole. As technology is in constant development, digital transformation, too, is an ongoing process. However, once the culture is in place and the technology is deployed, there are significant benefits to be had.

The Digital Port: Transforming an ancient economic hub without disrupting workers’ lives

Posted on 27/02/201921/06/2021 by Tushar

Today’s ports are struggling to manage the massive volume of containers arriving on giant vessels. Industry leaders are looking for new ideas to cope, but it’s hard to find answers that satisfy everyone.

The roots of the problem are multifold. Most obvious is the logjam that’s created when a modern ship laden with tens of thousands of containers arrives in port. Finding a spot to stack the large cargo is a problem. But the bigger issue is a matter of velocity. One-by-one, thousands of trucks enter and exit congested urban locations to drop off empty containers or pick up new loads. While freight rail is beginning to move an increased share of containers, the majority still arrive and leave the land-side of the port one or two at a time.

In an effort to reduce wait times and move containers faster, some container terminal operators are turning to waterfront robots to increase capacity and velocity while reducing cost. This type of automation has great potential, but we need to apply the same design thinking to the systems around the automation to realize the full potential of digital transformation.

A better way

So how do ports fully realize the goals of automation while optimizing the work environment and productivity of today’s port workers? First, we should consider all the parties involved:

Truckers who assume the costs for delays in picking up loads and dropping off empty containers.
Dock workers’ labor unions who want their members to participate in the benefits of automation and upskill the value of their members.
Terminal managers who want to maintain a lean staff for profitability but also need to increase capacity and velocity of operations.
Manufacturers and receivers who want lower demurrage and detention fees that result when there are delays in picking up freight and returning containers ready to ship.
Consumers who want faster deliveries.

Fortunately, there is a way to satisfy all parties and it begins with a modern Port Community System (PCS). A PCS can digitally tie together the Coast Guard, maritime shipping agents, port authority, freight forwarders, Customs, dangerous goods clearance, port and terminal gates, and many of the other entities in the port community.

As each party electronically completes its part of operations—declarations, permits requests, inspections, goods authorizations and more—the PCS immediately moves the filing, declaration, request, or approval to the queue of the next party, notifying them of updates specific to their work queue. Items they need to complete or adjust are noted, and wherever possible turned into drop-down lists. Ideally the workers can be notified and fill out forms from any device —at their desk, on a tablet at the docks, or on their phone in the truck.

Greasing the skids

The terminals, which are separate business entities, are tied together in the PCS under the supervision of the port authority. Any insufficiencies in the permits, requests, or declarations are immediately identified, and the sender is automatically notified for quick updates and resubmission. Eliminating the communication hurdles — paper documents, point-to-point (rather than end-to-end) filings, loading and unloading orders – can save significant time and cost for all parties. Furthermore, a PCS provides time-definite delivery commitments to shippers and sellers while reducing ship and container time in port.

For exports, freight forwarders who consolidate loads into containers will know when empty containers will arrive, reducing the number they need to keep on hand. For imports, freight forwarders and consolidators will know when to expect the containers they need to break down and repack for shipping to final destination. Maritime agents can get their ships out of port faster as they will be able to communicate the location of containers ready and approved for loading to terminal operators. Once a PCS is implemented, other steps can be taken to increase the efficiency of trucks moving in and out of the port.

At Anteelo, we’ve given this a lot of thought as we increasingly focus on the ports business and our own PCS solution, Port Logistics Accelerator. We’ve come to recognize that connecting people and automating the processes those people use every day will have the largest impact on costs and hence, profitability.

Anteelo’s Intermodal Appointment System (IAS), when integrated with the PCS, can notify truckers when their loads are ready, setting a specific appointment for pick-up and delivery agreed to by their trucking company (or themselves, if freelance). Further, our Intelligent Truck Parking (ITP) system can interface with the IAS, monitoring parking lots and assigning parking spots and timeslots. These systems make pick-ups predictable, smoothing the flow of traffic around and inside the port and terminals. They also save time and fuel while reducing pollution and congestion.

Enabling operational flexibility

A PCS can also help integrate the shunting operations required for full integration of freight rail into intermodal seaport logistics. This gives port operators flexibility to use the best value transportation method for each shipment while maximizing the traffic flow into and out of seaports.

There’s no doubt that robots have their place and that, over time, ports will manage a greater share of shipments using automation. It’s also true, however, that digital solutions like port community, appointment, and intelligent parking systems can help everyone achieve the aims they seek.

Action at the edge

Signs of M2M

The road ahead

Lessons from the battlefield

The new teams

1. Security

2. Reliability

3. Accessibility

4. More than just email

5. Adequate storage

6. Enough email addresses for your needs

7. Easy management

8. 24/7 technical support

Conclusion

Edge computing is on the rise

Multi-cloud management becomes an imperative

Data management gains new importance

Regulatory compliance impacts infrastructure

Data centers continue declines

Modern operating platform adoption grows

DevOps and security merge

High-performance computing moves to the cloud

Optimising for search intent

Redefining domain authority

Optimising for image searches

Optimising for voice searches

Conclusion

1. WordPress

2. WooCommerce

3. PersonalSign

4. cPanel hosting

5. Google Analytics

6. Yoast SEO

7. Automated remote backups

Conclusion

What is digital transformation?

What are the advantages of digital transformation?

Making the most of data

Cost savings

Consolidation

Creating customer-centric businesses

More attractive products and services

Precise market segmentation

Omnichannel customer experiences

A more agile and innovative business

Conclusion

A better way

Greasing the skids

Enabling operational flexibility

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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Contact

India (HQ)

Atlanta, USA

London, UK

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Melbourne, Australia

Surabaya, Indonesia

India (HQ)

Atlanta

London

Dubai

Australia

Indonesia

Take a look at our global hideouts.