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Artificial intelligence (AI) software provider x.ai has announced the launch of the Professional version of its personal assistant product.

The personal assistant, Amy – or twin brother Andrew – schedules meetings on behalf of users, saving plenty of admin time. All users need to do is connect their calendars to x.ai, and cc Amy or Andrew, who does the rest.

The beta version was launched in June 2014, and since then the New York-based startup has been building up its data set and infrastructure. According to Dennis R. Mortensen, x.ai CEO, the key to launching a professional-grade version was playing the waiting game.

“Teaching a machine to understand natural language, even using the most advanced data science, is by any definition super hard. Add to that the fact that meeting scheduling is a high accuracy setting,” he said. “So it was important for us to wait to roll out a paid product until we felt Amy was smart enough to schedule meetings nearly flawlessly.”

Customers already using the Professional product include Walmart, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and The New York Times, as well as Astronomer, a data science engineering platform. “Once I had access to Amy, I was able to consistently schedule twice as many meetings with a small fraction of the effort,” said Ry Walker, Astronomer CEO. “There’s no question in my mind that x.ai has helped me move faster to do my real job, which is to build a great company.”

The full name of the assistants are Amy and Andrew Ingram. The initials referring to AI are obvious, but the remainder of their name, ‘N-Gram’, is a reference to a computational linguistics and probability technique.

x.ai uses the MongoDB NoSQL database to power its personal assistants, and writing for sister publication CloudTech in December last year, Kelly Stirman, VP strategy, discussed the importance of the correct infrastructure in powering AI initiatives. “Cloud computing solved the two biggest hurdles for AI: abundant, low cost computing and a way to leverage massive volumes of data,” he wrote. “Small, focused, cloud-based algorithms are going to be the AI that changes our lives over the next decade. It’s better to solve one problem really well than it is to solve 100 problems poorly.”

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Microsoft has launched a cloud services due diligence checklist aimed at providing organisations with more standardised procedures for their potential cloud push.

The checklist is based on the emerging ISO/IEC 19086 standard which focuses on cloud service level agreements, and gives structure to organisations of all sizes and sectors to identify their objectives and requirements, before comparing the offerings of different cloud service providers.

“Cloud adoption is no longer simply a technology decision,” Microsoft writes in a page explaining the checklist. “Because checklist requirements touch on every aspect of an organisation, they serve to convene all key internal decision makers – the CIO and CISO as well as legal, risk management, procurement, and compliance professionals.

“The checklist promotes a thoroughly vetted move to the cloud, providing a structured guidance and a consistent, repeatable approach to choosing a cloud service provider,” it adds.

It’s worth noting, as Microsoft does in the document, that the checklist is not intended to be, nor should be considered a substitute for the 19086 standard – its role is to essentially distil the 37 page standard document into two pages – yet it does go through performance, service, data management and governance checks.

In putting the checklist together, Microsoft also cited a Forrester research study which argued that more than 94% of organisations polled would change some terms in their current cloud agreement. Agreements often miss key considerations due to their complex nature, the research notes, while topics cloud buyers regret not having in their agreements are around security, privacy, and awareness around internal key stakeholders.

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told delegates at the company’s Transform conference in London how cloud computing, through powering artificial intelligence and machine learning, was putting technology “in the hands of humanity.” Back in August, the company announced it had obtained ISO 27017 compliance, which gives additional controls specifically relating to cloud services.

You can download the full checklist here.

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Disaster recovery (DR) forms a critical part of a comprehensive business continuity plan and can often be the difference between the success and failure of an organisation. After all, disasters do happen — whether that’s a DDoS attack, data breach, network failure, human error, or by a natural event like a flood.

While the importance of having such a strategy is well recognised, how many organisations actually have the right plan in place? Not many, according to the 2014 Disaster Recovery Preparedness Benchmarking Survey which revealed that more than 60% of companies don’t actually have a documented DR strategy. More than that, the survey found that 40% of those companies that do have one said it wasn’t effective during a disaster or DR event.

Taking the above into consideration, what can businesses do to ensure their plans are not only in place, but also work as they should and allow organisations to recover quickly and effectively post disaster?

One aspect to consider is using the cloud to handle your DR requirements as it is a cost-effective and agile way of keeping your business running during and after a disaster. DR cloud solutions or disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) deliver a number of benefits to business. These include: faster recovery, better flexibility, off-site data backup, real-time replication of data, excellent scalability, and the use of secure infrastructure. In addition, there’s a significant cost saving as no hardware is required — hardware that would be sitting idle while your business is functioning as normal.

Another aspect is testing. Not only should DR strategies be continuously tested, but they should also be updated and adapted in line with changes in the business environment and wider technology ecosystem, as well as industry or market shifts. Again, this is seen as important, but practically, isn’t happening as it should. According to the same benchmarking survey, only 6.7% of organisations surveyed test their plans weekly, while 19.2% test annually and 23.3% never test them at all.

The practicalities of implementation can often be challenging — from budgetary issues, buy-in from CIOs and the type of solution itself. DR means different things to different people — from recovery time, in terms of minutes or weeks, to its scope covering just critical systems or encompassing all IT.

So where do you start?

Identify and define your needs

The first stage of defining these requirements includes performing a risk assessment often in conjunction with a business impact analysis. This includes considering how age, volume and criticality of data, and looks at your organisation’s entire IT estate. DR can be an expensive exercise and the initial stage of strategy development can help you with evaluating the risk versus the cost.

Your data could be hosted on or off site; and for externally hosted solutions this means making sure your hosting provider has the right credentials (for example, ISO 27001) and expertise to supply the infrastructure, connectivity and support needed to guarantee uptime and availability.

It is also during this phase that you should define your recovery time objectives — the anticipated time you would need to recover IT and business activities — and your recovery point objectives — the point in time to which you recover your backed up data.

Creating your DR plan

A successful DR strategy encompasses a number of components, from data and technology, to people and physical facilities. When developing the actual plan and the steps within it, you need to remember that it affects the entire organisation.

Connectivity plays a critical role here, specifically in how staff will access the recovered environment, i.e. though a dedicated link or VPN. Is additional connectivity needed for the implementation of the strategy to work? And if so, how much will this cost?

Test, assess, test, assess

The final stage is an ongoing one and is all about testing the plan. With traditional DR it is often difficult to do live testing without causing a significant system disruption. In additional testing complex plans comes with its own degree of risk. However, with DRaaS, many solutions on the market include no impact testing options.

At this point it is also important to assess how the plan performs in the event of an actual disaster. In this way weaknesses or gaps can be identified, driving areas of improvement for future plans.

Conclusion

In today’s business environment it is safe to assume that your organisation will experience a disaster or event of some kind that will affect operations, cause downtime or make certain services unavailable. Having a DR strategy in place — one that works, is regularly tested and addresses all areas of operations — will help mitigate the risk and ensure the organisation can recover quickly without the event having too much of a negative impact on customer experience, the brand or the bottom line.

HTI Labs in London provides the means and governance with its Schematiq tool to bring critical data services to the interface users want.
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