Today’s businesses run in the virtual world. From virtual machines to chatbots to Bitcoin, physical has become last century’s modus operandi. Dealing with this type of change in business even has its own buzzword – Digital Transformation. From an information technology operations point of view, this has been manifested by organizations increasingly placing applications, virtual servers, storage platforms, networks, managed services and other assets in multiple cloud environments. Managing these virtual assets can be much more challenging than it was with traditional physical assets in your data center. Cost management and control are also vastly different than the physical asset equivalent. Challenges abound around tracking and evaluating cloud investments, managing their costs and increasing their efficiency. Managers need to track cloud spending and usage, compare costs with budgets and obtain actionable insights that help set appropriate governance policies.

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In recent years AI has grown significantly and become a substantial area of business investment. What has changed, and how does this affect you?

For a long time, artificial intelligence was pure science fiction, relegated to books, television and movies—and you don’t need us to tell you that we are well past that point today. In the last few years we have seen extremely rapid advancement in a series of technologies that have come together to unlock a wave of AI investment. According to Accenture, 85% of executives plan to invest extensively in AI in the next three years, and in the same time period, Forrester estimates that businesses using AI will “steal” $1.2 trillion from companies that don’t.

Mark Troester

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As companies make a move for their initial public offering (IPO), the investor page goes up, the bell gets rung on the NYSE, and, perhaps most importantly, their financial results have to be displayed for all to see.

Cloudera and Okta, two companies who declared their intentions to go public within weeks of each other in April, have announced their second quarter 2018 financial results, with both companies beating expectations.

Cloudera, a big data software provider, announced total revenues of $89.8 million (£68.1m) for the quarter ending July 31, a claimed 39% increase from this time last year, while identity management provider Okta offered total revenues of $61 million (£46.2m), an increase of 62.9% year on year.

Speaking to analysts following the results, Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, discussed machine learning and artificial intelligence as key to the company’s future, citing a recent quote from The Economist around data being the world’s most valuable resource ahead of oil.

“The organisations that extract the most value from that raw resource will be the winners in a new data-driven economy,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Cloudera’s modern platform for machine learning analytics provides a flexible enterprise grade environment for organisations to harvest the value of data of all types, whether in the cloud or on-premises.

“Cloudera’s customers have been building machine learning analytics applications on our platform for years,” added Reilly. “Today, we have hundreds of large enterprises’ introduction of those applications, fundamentally improving the way they grow, connect and protect their businesses. We love those applications…they are simply ravenous for data.”

For Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, the company’s ‘born in the cloud’ approach means the company is ‘on the right side of history’ in the shift to greater devices, greater complexity, and greater security headaches. “We believe we are in the driver’s seat as this transformation unfolds, and Okta continues to set the standard for managing identity in the extended enterprise and transforming the customer experience,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

With the AI side in mind, it was also revealed that Cloudera will acquire Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company. In a post titled ‘To the Future…’, by founder Hilary Mason, said the company and the industry was ‘just getting started’ around machine learning opportunities.

“We’re delighted to join forces with a company that drives progress in the foundational technologies our work relies on,” wrote Mason. “By joining Cloudera, we will be able to bring the opportunities discovered in our research to life in new ways, at the scale of the Cloudera platform.”

You can read Cloudera’s financials here and Okta’s here.

Google has launched Interconnect Dedicated, a new service which aims to help organisations establish a private network connection direct to its cloud.

The service differs from its previous interconnect operation – now called Carrier Peering – with the direct link, while it differs from Google Cloud VPN, which securely connects on-premises networks to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) virtual private cloud (VPC) network, through having a minimum deployment per location of 10 Gbps in bandwidth.

Interconnect Dedicated offers up to 80 Gbps – eight times the 10 Gbps increments, or in other words, selecting one to eight circuits from Google’s Cloud Console – and is available in up to 17 locations across four continents.

In the documentation, Google describes four benefits of Interconnect Dedicated, including the scalability factor. The company adds the cost of egress traffic from the VPC network to the on-premises network will be reduced – a dedicated connection is ‘generally’ the least expensive method with a high volume of traffic to and from Google’s network – while internal IP addresses are directly accessible from the on-premises network and there are less points of failure where traffic might get disrupted.

As is usually the case, a customer gets wheeled out to note the benefits of the product; in this case, it is real-time analytics firm Metamarkets. “Accessing GCP with high bandwidth, low latency, and consistent network connectivity is critical for our business objectives,” said Nhan Phan, Metamarkets VP engineering in a statement. “Google’s Dedicated Interconnect allows us to successfully achieve higher reliability, higher throughput and lower latency while reducing the total cost of ownership by more than 60%, compared to solutions over the public internet.”

Google’s cloud announcements have been coming at pace of late. Two weeks ago, the company unveiled variable networking tiers, claimed at the time to be the first from a major public cloud provider. According to Google’s most recent financial results, the company tripled the number of its big cloud deals, rated at $500,000 or more.

You can read the full blog post explaining Interconnect Dedicated here.

Main picture credit: Google

I recently visited my dentist and found the experience, well, less than satisfactory. I was subjected to 45 minutes of lecturing while strapped into the dentist chair:

“You don’t brush enough times a day. You don’t brush long enough. You don’t brush correctly. You aren’t using the right type of toothbrush. You aren’t replacing the brush head soon enough. You aren’t flossing enough. You aren’t flossing correctly. You aren’t using the right type of floss.”

Good lord! It’s any wonder that my teeth aren’t just falling out of my head!!
No one likes being lectured. It’s not constructive and after a while, you just turn it off. That’s probably similar to the feeling of going to these Big Data conferences – constantly being told what you aren’t doing right. And maybe I’m guilty of doing that as well. If I am, then I’m sorry because from an audience perspective, it sucks.

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The concept of speed as an advantage is not new. Over the course of 700 years, the Romans built and maintained a system of roads extending over 55,000 miles to enable speedy communications and the quick movement of troops across the vast expanse of the empire.
What’s different today is that digital technologies have warped our perception of time. As an example, a person might say they live five minutes from town, but that can have widely different meanings based on whether they were referring to walking or driving a car. Digital technologies compress our perception of time and space while expanding our expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time. We expect to complete the equivalent of one hour of shopping in a supermarket in one minute online. These changes significantly impact the way businesses must operate in a digital era to compete and remain relevant.

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Fintech is a lucrative, yet quite saturated market. In order to stay competitive, businesses should keep track of the emerging trends and be able to capitalize on them before their competitors do.
Artificial Intelligence is currently among the most promising fintech trends. Leading financial brands such as Capital One, MasterCard, as well as hundreds of startups have set the pace for the adoption of virtual financial advisors. If you want to stay ahead of your competition or simply explore the opportunities for AI in fintech, this article is for you.

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Every time there’s a notable cybersecurity breach, someone (even me) writes a comprehensive primer on the proper way to create “secure” passwords. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until a few years ago, everyone (including me) based their password advice on a 2003 paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the catchy title “NIST Special Publication 800-63.” The paper recommended that passwords be cryptic, contain special characters, and be as close to nonsense as possible.

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