Nicole Kobie

AI and automation stand accused of embedding existing biases and furthering discrimination – but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can build machines that make us better, helping us recognise and push back against our assumptions, confirmation bias, and other flaws that lead to discrimination.

That’s the idea behind a multitude of HR and work-themed bots and AI systems, all hoping to machine discrimination out of existence and encourage diversity at work. One prominent example has been the Financial Times’ sourcing bot, which skims through journalists’ copy, making note of the gender of people mentioned, helping the newspaper track its own tendency to interview and feature men rather than women.

In recruitment, LinkedIn has added diversity data to its recruitment tools, while startup Textio will read your job ads and advise changes to encourage a wider range of applicants.

«Recruitment and HR is our fastest growing area, where HR directors are coming to us saying we want to build unbiased systems,» said Tabitha Goldstaub, co-founder of AI advice platform CognitionX.

Like tools such as Grammarly, Textio pop-ups help improve the language recruiters use

Diversity at work has both a moral impetus and legal ramifications: discrimination on the grounds of gender, race or religion is already illegal in the UK. However, companies are starting to realise that choosing from a wider range of applicants and creating an inclusive workplace can be good for profit margins, too.

Indeed, consultancy McKinsey & Co analysed more than 1,000 companies across a dozen countries, revealing that those with the most diverse staff saw higher than average profits.

No wonder then that building diverse and inclusive teams is the number one talent priority for HR departments, according to a LinkedIn report on recruiting trends, with 78% of respondents saying it was «very or extremely important» to their hiring plans. Why? They think it’s good for business and creates a better working culture. (Rarely is it listed as being «the right thing to do» or «a legal requirement», but we’ll take what we can get.)

Tracking talent

Tracking diversity is a challenge: 42% of HR departments said in the LinkedIn survey that they lack the data quality necessary to address such challenges. With that in mind, the professional social network has added gender-tracking tools to its Talent Insights platform, a data reporting tool that helps recruiters.

«When it comes to gender diversity, using tools such as LinkedIn Talent Insights will help organisations understand their own overall workforce composition, as well as within different functions, and see how they benchmark against the industry at large and spot areas of opportunities to address,» said Jerome Leclercq, senior manager of product marketing at LinkedIn UK. «This avoids manual processes that deliver insights that is often outdated by the time you get it in your hands.»

LinkedIn’s Talent Pool Report helps recruiters access more diverse talent pools by including gender insights

In LinkedIn Talent Insights, companies will be able to see the gender representation of their own workforce, compare that to industry benchmarks, set recruiting objectives, and find out where to find more diverse applicants for roles – more colloquially, where the ladies are.

«The Linkedin Talent Insights Talent Pool Report now includes gender insights to help talent teams identify industries, locations, titles and skills where the gender representation is more favourable,» said Leclercq.

«Using these insights, recruiters can refine and expand their sourcing to tap into more diverse talent pools.»

In the LinkedIn Recruiter platform, HR departments will still see all qualified candidates, but more attention is paid to distribution in search results, with each page reflecting the gender mix of the available talent pool, Leclercq explained.

«As a very simple example, if the available talent pool for programmers with C and C++ skills in the Philadelphia area that you identified in Talent Insights is 42% women and 58% men, you’ll see that same basic proportion on each page of results to make sure your recruiting team is seeing candidates that best reflect the gender distribution of the marketplace,» he said.

Tweaking job adverts with Textio

Textio is similar to Grammarly or a spellchecker in Word, but rather than looking for typos, it considers the response you’ll get from the words and phrases you choose. Textio Hire is its first application, a tool to analyse job posts and recruitment emails to make suggestions to speed up hiring times, candidate quality, and diversity of applicants.

Textio Hire analyses the tone of job adverts, giving a score and suggesting improvements

«Textio’s predictive engine uses a combination of natural-language processing and data mining to find the words that have an impact on your hiring pipeline and bring them to your attention while you are writing,» explained CEO and cofounder Kieran Snyder. «In the example of unconscious gender bias in your writing, the predictive engine finds the words and phrases that are statistically likely to create an imbalance between the number of men and women who are inspired to respond to your job ad today.»

The app not only highlights problematic language, but makes suggestions, too. «Textio Hire uses its massive analytical power to not only improve what’s been written, but it also imagines the things that haven’t been written,» said Snyder. «It can tell which one of those alternate phrases will create the best version of the job post.»

While we humans can watch for biased language in our own writing, automation can make it easier to spot patterns and see outcomes that aren’t obvious to us.

«Most of the patterns that emerge are truly things you just cannot theorise or guess, which is why a platform like Textio needs so much data to uncover the real patterns that change hiring outcomes,» said Snyder, noting that «exhaustive» is a word that attracts more male applications, «loves learning» attracts more women, and «synergy» is a turn-off to people of colour. «You can’t guess what works without massive data sets and the machine learning technology to find the hidden patterns,» she said. «Intuition fails us.»

Can tweaking a few words in a job ad work? Textio Hire claims that it helped Johnson & Johnson increase applications from underrepresented candidates by 22%, while Cisco gets 10% more female candidates and fills positions more quickly.

Using the right data

Another way to boost inclusivity in hiring is using automation to sift through applications, but train a system on flawed or skewed data and it will mirror your previous mistakes, notes Goldstaub. Look at Amazon: according to reports, the tech giant used AI to sift through CVs, but as the system was trained on skewed data – its own previous hires, which were predominantly male – it tended to chuck applications from women into the bin. The machine-learning system has since been dropped, according to a Reuters report.

The Recruiter platform on LinkedIn gives the gender balance of candidates as a percentage

Getting such technology right requires three elements: feeding the correct data, training the AI appropriately, and having humans in the loop to check the results, says Goldstaub. If, as with the Amazon trial, most successful hires in the past were men, there won’t be enough data to train your system with. But if you’re trying to encourage a wider range of applicants, you can «weight the data so we can find the people we want to look for, rather than people just like the ones we already have,» said Goldstaub. As she notes, ignore anyone who blames bias on the machines – it isn’t in control, we humans are. «We are in control of this, and don’t need to just use the data we have already.»

But that raises an «ethical conundrum,» as Goldstaub puts it. «Should we have fairer data, even if it’s not accurate data? That’s a question we can ask ourselves and decide how we want to manage that.»

Artificial intelligence might give us tools to battle back against discrimination, but we still need to face the tough questions ourselves.

In today’s always-on world, customer expectations have changed. Competitive differentiation is delivered through rapid software innovations, the ability to respond to issues quickly and by releasing high-quality code with minimal interruptions. DevOps isn’t some far off goal; it’s methodologies and practices are a response to this demand. The demand to go faster. The demand for more uptime. The demand to innovate. In this keynote, we will cover the Nutanix Developer Stack. Built from the foundation of software-defined infrastructure, Nutanix has rapidly expanded into full application lifecycle management across any infrastructure or cloud .Join us as we delve into how the Nutanix Developer Stack makes it easy to build hybrid cloud applications by weaving DBaaS, micro segmentation, event driven lifecycle operations, and both financial and cloud governance together into a single unified stack.

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EU adoption of cloud computing increased to 26% in 2018, up from just 18% from four years prior, according to new research published by Eurostat. However, while the majority of EU businesses are utilising cloud services for emails and file storage, fewer are embracing more advances cloud-based business applications like accounting software, ERP, CRM data analytics, or team productivity tools.

For business leaders, cloud computing represents an opportunity to improve business flexibility and facilitate increased growth by providing elastic, on demand access to core business applications, key analytics platforms and collaboration tools.

While third-party cloud services are often associated with reduce capital cost, including fewer FTE’s compared to traditional locally hosted infrastructures or privately hosted cloud servers, the price of this flexibility may incur some additional operating costs. However, often these additional costs are justifiable for reducing complexity and increasing business flexibility. Cloud vendors assume the responsibility for keeping their software up to date, backed-up, and applying all security patches; removing the need for in-house specialists to do the same.

The availability of new cloud hosted team communication tools can also help to improve cross departmental collaboration and ultimately, improve business efficiency. Cloud collaboration tools such as video conferencing, web conferencing and project management platforms can help to increase creativity, teamwork and efficiency. The ability for entire teams to work seamlessly and concurrently on a single project, irrespective of time or location can help to streamline workloads and decrease project timelines.

Utilising cloud-based software means businesses can also foster a culture of organic collaboration within their organisation; by unifying office-based employees and remote employees with teams across the globe and giving them the tools to build collaborative working relationships.

Another key driver in the increasing adoption of cloud technology, across both the EU and the US, is flexibility. In adopting cloud services, companies are able to scale their transaction volumes up and down depending on the immediate business needs. This model is an incredibly attractive proposition for companies who experience cyclical resource demands, as the provision of computing and storage resource capacity is elastic and can be scaled up or down in direct response to changes in the number of application users, number of customer calls or volume of customer orders.

Cloud computing vendors can also offer businesses great value by offering to handle the ever-increasing amount of data businesses gather from their customer base. Vendors’ specialist in-house teams can build internal processes into their platforms to ensure that all data is handled in line with best practice, regional laws and regulations.

In a post-GDPR landscape, businesses on both sides of the Atlantic need to ensure that they are appropriately safe-guarding European citizens’ data. Not only are cloud vendors well versed in the legislative landscapes of the regions they serve, but they can also offer a series of storage offerings such as virtual private clouds. Cloud vendors will also ensure the necessary levels of encryption are implemented to keep your customer’s data safe, compliant and minimise the risk of breaches.

Ultimately, cloud services can help to significantly improve the scalability and elasticity of a business, while simultaneously providing companies with the opportunity to improve connectivity, communication, and organic collaboration across their organisation. They also present an opportunity to out-source many business-critical systems and services, improving their accessibility and reliability. Cloud services can offer considerable strategic value to business leaders by enabling their teams to focus on the core business capability, whilst providing them access to a range of scalable key business applications to give them the opportunity to gain a competitive edge over their competitors.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Reports of the death of the relational database have been greatly exaggerated – at least in the enterprise.

According to a new study from Progress Software – the company’s latest annual data connectivity report – while the on-premises relational database behemoths of SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle have declined year on year, the cloud push is not yet forthcoming for mission-critical workloads.

55% of the more than 1,400 business and IT professionals surveyed said they or their customers were currently using SQL, compared with 40% for MySQL and 37% for Oracle. “For important data, there is no substitute for relational databases,” the report noted.

“Modern options such as big data, NoSQL still aren’t the right fit for all business needs, with analytical tooling for these modern databases still in its infancy,” the report added. “Thus RDBMS databases are keeping pace and are here to stay in the enterprise for the foreseeable future.”

Indeed, enterprise decision makers see cloud and NoSQL databases as there to solve alternative problems for businesses, such as enabling greater fluidity across different platforms and accelerated edge to cloud workloads.

In comparison, one in three (32%) organisations polled said they did not use any big data platforms or interfaces. Perhaps surprisingly, Amazon S3 only polled 19% of the vote, with a further 5% saying they plan to use it in the coming two years. As for the other big data vendors, Hadoop Hive (17%) was the most popular, ahead of Spark SQL (10%) and Hortonworks (7%).

When it came to NoSQL, MongoDB (27% currently supported, 7% plan to adopt) was by far the most popular technology among respondents. Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the changing atmosphere surrounding several of the leading open source providers. Towards the end of last year Confluent – which recently secured a $2.5 billion valuation – changed its licensing terms with one eye on the largest cloud vendors running software as a service through their technology. MongoDB has done the same thing, as has Redis Labs, used by 7% of those polled by Progress.

Speaking of which, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the most popular cloud provider according to survey respondents, cited by 44% of those polled. Microsoft Azure (39%) was not far behind, until a significant gap to VMware (22%) and Google Cloud (18%). Only 8% of respondents were IBM houses. AWS had seen a 12% uptick year on year, with Azure (+7%) and GCP (+3%) the others to see growth.

Underpinning all the data these organisations pick up, whether they use relational or non-relational databases to structure it, is business intelligence. Organisations use on average 2.5 different BI reporting tools, with Tableau usage increasing the most. Excel (42%) was perhaps not surprisingly the most popular tool, ahead of Microsoft BI Platform (26%), Tableau (22%) and Power BI (18%), showcasing a Microsoft-heavy top list. The report noted how the need for data visualisation has grown significantly, as well as embedded analytics.

“As enterprises grow, a wide variety of data is produced, consumed and stored at different parts of the organisation. The challenge is to effectively manage and leverage the volume, variety and velocity of data,” the report concluded. “At a time when budgets and resources remain tight, the old approach of trying constantly to increase expenditures on infrastructure and hardware assets can’t keep pace.

“The success of a business lies in its seamless data connectivity and integration technology in an increasingly hybrid cloud/on-premises world.”

You can read the full report here (email required).

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Using serverless computing has a number of obvious benefits over traditional application infrastructure – you pay only for what you use, scale up or down immediately to match supply with demand, and avoid operating any server infrastructure at all.

However, implementing maintainable and scalable applications using serverless computing services like AWS Lambda poses a number of challenges. The absence of long-lived, user-managed servers means that states cannot be maintained by the service. Longer function invocation times (referred to as cold starts) become very important to track, because they impact the response time of the service and will impose additional cost. Additionally, the transition to smaller individual components (much like breaking a monolithic application into microservices) results in a simpler deployment model, but makes the system as a whole increasingly complex.

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While a hybrid cloud can ease that transition, designing and deploy that hybrid cloud still offers challenges for organizations concerned about lack of available cloud skillsets within their organization. Managed service providers offer a unique opportunity to fill those gaps and get organizations of all sizes on a hybrid cloud that meets their comfort level, while delivering enhanced benefits for cost, efficiency, agility, mobility, and elasticity.

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In a recent survey, Sumo Logic surveyed 1,500 customers who employ cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to the survey, a quarter of the respondents have already deployed Docker containers and nearly as many (23 percent) are employing the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework.

It’s clear: serverless is here to stay. The adoption does come with some needed changes, within both application development and operations. That means serverless is also changing the way we leverage public clouds. Truth-be-told, many enterprise IT shops were so happy to get out of the management of physical servers within a data center that many limitations of the existing public IaaS clouds were forgiven. However, now that we’ve lived a few years with public IaaS clouds, developers and CloudOps pros are giving a huge thumbs down to the constant monitoring of servers, provisioned or not, that’s required to support the workloads.

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Public clouds dominate IT conversations but the next phase of cloud evolutions are «multi» hybrid cloud environments. The winners in the cloud services industry will be those organizations that understand how to leverage these technologies as complete service solutions for specific customer verticals. In turn, both business and IT actors throughout the enterprise will need to increase their engagement with multi-cloud deployments today while planning a technology strategy that will constitute a significant part of their IT budgets in the very near future. As IoT solutions are growing rapidly, as well as security challenges growing exponentially, without a doubt, the cloud world is about to change for the better. Again.

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A recent IDG survey reported that 89% of businesses have, or plan to, invest in digital initiatives this year. But despite the buzz around digital transformation, implementing it isn’t always smooth sailing – only 44% fully adopted the approach. Introducing new company-wide initiatives can be a daunting prospect for leaders, employees and CIOs alike, but particularly for the latter when it comes to assessing the best cloud environment for a business.

Successful digital transformation isn’t possible without core infrastructure which is fast, and offers maximum reliability and flexibility. In today’s environment, public cloud is no longer the go-to solution, and businesses should consider a multi-cloud strategy to cater for their individual needs.

Before exploring its benefits and challenges businesses ought to consider, I’ll look at what multi-cloud is and how it differs to hybrid cloud.

Public, private, hybrid and multi – a lesson in cloud

We are living in the era of cloud adoption. A report released by Eurostat in December 2018 revealed that 26% of European enterprises are using the cloud. While this may seem low, the point is that there is still enormous room for growth as more businesses make the transition to cloud-based infrastructure.

While multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are closely related, they are not one and the same. Hybrid cloud, as the name implies, is a combination of public and private cloud services. For certain businesses, the model enables organisations to tap into the benefits of the public cloud, while maintaining their own private cloud for sensitive, critical or highly regulated data and applications.

In recent years, the popularity of public and hybrid cloud has signalled that more businesses are seeking off-premise services. That said, even hybrid cloud only offers a service, meaning a singular entity. Multi-cloud on the other hand, is a series of entities that can be brought under centralised management. A multi-cloud strategy is an approach that operates any combination of private, public and hybrid clouds. Therefore, an organisation may have multiple public and private clouds, or multiple hybrid clouds, all either connected or not.

Despite the types of cloud environments you choose to operate in, its these technological breakthroughs in cloud infrastructure that has allowed companies to ideate and conceive new solutions and services at a faster pace.

Take the Internet of Things phenomenon as an example. The proliferation of wearable devices, smart household appliances and security sensors has only been made possible through developments in multi-cloud infrastructure. But putting global internet trends aside, what are the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy? And what challenges are there to consider when implementing it?

With multi-cloud, the world is your oyster

It’s worth for a moment pausing to take into account the benefits of hybrid cloud first. Hybrid cloud lets organisations take advantage of the scalability that the public cloud offers. It also lets businesses share resources and migrate between public and private clouds to take advantage of resource costs and network traffic levels which are often in flux.

That all said, with multi-cloud, the world becomes your oyster. A multi-cloud approach provides the most comprehensive mix of public and private clouds, and they don’t necessarily need to be integrated, unlike hybrid cloud. Moreover, businesses today don’t have to be locked in to one provider. Certain platforms are built on open-source technologies like OpenStack, which are widely supported by a range of cloud service providers and vendors such as OVH. At the very least, opting for an open cloud gives businesses an extra element of flexibility.

From speaking to our customers at OVH, combining on-premise and cloud infrastructure with a multi-cloud strategy has allowed them to connect to networks in a totally isolated and secure way, via numerous points of presence around the world.

What’s more, I’ve noticed how it has allowed organisations to shift to the cloud at their own pace and take a flexible approach – all while responding to their strategic objectives. This means businesses can control and run an application, workload, or data on any cloud (public, private and hybrid) based on their individual technical requirements.

Careful consideration

While there are many benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, naturally with new process come new challenges. Multiple cloud platforms can open up a wider range of possible vulnerabilities. Thus, they require extra effort to gain effective security, governance and compliance. Today however, businesses can take back an element of control and issues can be offset with thorough training for employees on security requirements. For example, organisations can roll out mandatory IT staff training about how to avoid failures in protection and what the reaction to a security breach or data loss should be.

Therefore, successful multi-cloud security requires embracing cloud-based offerings capable of providing continuous verification, analytics, and governance throughout your software delivery and operations processes.

Another point to consider when opting for cloud diversity is maintaining control of your budget. In order to ensure maximum efficiency with a multi-cloud strategy, it can be useful to have an internal team that can consolidate data and provide a cost benefit analysis for the organisation. It’s also important to monitor cloud spends and finetune them depending on current and upcoming projects.

Whichever way you cut it, cloud adoption is not a matter of it, but when. Importantly, if a business is undergoing change, there are a myriad of cloud environments to help organisations manage that change. As technology continues to advance, cloud infrastructure will become a mandatory requirement for organisations of all sizes to develop and grow. To cater to every organisations’ changing needs, we’re increasingly advocating a multi-cloud approach that will allow businesses to achieve their digital transformation needs.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.