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Working from home is the latest reality for many workers in the US, and the world, as the coronavirus spreads. While people these days are away from the public spaces, they are available online.

Companies are shutting down their offices due to the coronavirus, and for many, the possibility of working remotely is now a way of life— and simply inescapable. From setting up a VPN to accessing work files to having a decent workout indoors, WFH is the new “normal”!

Even if you’ve done it previously, working from home can feel like a whole new thing now because of the coronavirus: It’s all sudden and might last for a longer period of time.

Some of employers’ biggest concerns involve workers struggling with loneliness, managing their time, and communication with team members.

Although all of this can be challenging, having a workable strategy can help you make it through.

Set up Your Workstation

One simply cannot concentrate on the work while sitting in the living room with family around. You need a dedicated spot where you shouldn’t get distracted and deliver the work with greater concentration. If possible, set up a work desk in your bedroom or some other suitable place. By doing so, you will get a feeling of working in a proper office setting.

Make Use of Proper Technology

Properly check your computer system, internet connectivity, networking tools, emails and video conferencing devices you need to work from home. You should have a good internet connection, which must be VPN-protected, while you work remotely.

Data is essential and valuable. So, it’s your duty to secure and protect your data from interruption. You can get your laptop or desktop checked by your office network administrator, if necessary.

Good Gears Are Essential

A proper computer is an essential item, whether you are using a desktop with a large display or a portable laptop that can be deployed throughout your home. Make sure it has a soft keyboard, a video calling camera, and cybersecurity software to secure data. Moreover, in case of a power failure, or virus or hardware breakdown, a good backup solution is also necessary.

Keep Track of Your Time

Just as you designate and separate your physical workspace, you must be specific about when you are working and when you are not. If you stick with your regular hours, you can get the best work done and be more prepared for the transition back to the office. Also, if your job is collaborative, it makes it much simpler to be on the same timeline as your coworkers.

With the help of time-tracking apps, you can keep track of working hours by logging in the start and end time of tasks, ventures, and issues. You can use the time-sheets to prevent any confusion and send them to the managers or employer for approval.

Fix Issues Related to Wi-Fi

As most devices now connect wirelessly, your home work experience can rely a great deal on your Wi-Fi efficiency. Several devices that run on one network will create internal traffic issues and downgrade performance while working remotely.

If you’ve had more than five years with the same router, now may be a perfect time to upgrade. Newer routers deliver wireless dual- and tri-band networks. You can easily segment the wireless network into two networks with newer, multi-band routers: 2,4 GHz and 5 GHz.

The 5 GHz network is a faster, broader wireless band with less interference and is suitable for connecting to, teleconferencing or transferring huge files while accessing business applications.

Ensure Security of Home Network

Always ensure that all devices on your home network, and those you use for business, have the latest software upgrades (which often contain necessary security patches) as well as any anti-virus software upgrades.

Communication is Key

If you haven’t worked from home previously, there would definitely be some hiccups along the way if you suddenly have to go entirely remote. Communication — particularly with the manager and direct reports — is the secret to driving through these bumps.

Come up with a strategy that sets out goals as to how much you will check in and how you’re going to communicate any changes or new tasks. Do the same for anyone you usually deal during the working hours.

So, you needn’t just stick to text-based communication. You may find it better to check in over the phone or via video chat with your manager and coworkers. This would reduce miscommunication and break up some of the social isolation that can emerge during work from home.

Many big IT companies such as Amazon (Web Services), Google (Cloud Platform), Microsoft (Azure) and IBM (Developer Cloud) have started providing Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) in the last few years. These programs are intended to reduce the entrance costs of using Artificial Intelligence to other companies.

So, what is AIaaS?

Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) helps businesses to leverage AI for different use cases while simultaneously reducing risk and expense. This can involve a sampling of several public cloud platforms to test various algorithms in machine learning. The applicability of AIaaS reaches through all sectors and as the features associated with each service provider are different, users can choose from a number of choices, including enterprises.

In this article, we will look at some of the advantages that businesses can gain by using AIaaS.

Why leverage AIaaS for the business solution?

Cost and Time Effective

One of the major advantages associated with AIaaS is the reduced expense and time taken to implement the solution. It saves businesses from setting up their own applications by having a ready infrastructure and pretrained algorithms. While earlier business solutions had to create their own application, now all that businesses need to do in this case is to call a service provider.

AIaaS is based on existing cloud framework by training the machine learning models and then deploying them for inference to VMs and containers. Service providers use the existing infrastructure that would otherwise have built on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) without building custom machine learning models. That is another significant benefit as it decreases financial risk and increases strategic versatility.

Usability

With AWS, Microsoft and Google leading the market, businesses are now competing with each other to build tools for data scientists and developers in an effort to be more than just service providers. Adding to this is the move to open-source their platforms such as TensorFlow, Caffe and AutoML enabling developers to create a custom AI model.

Transparency

With lower costs, there’s a lot of transparency within AIaaS: pay for what you’re using. Even though machine learning takes a lot of power to hewn it’s working, you may only need the power in a short period of time – you don’t have to run AI non-stop.

Scalability

AIaaS lets you begin with smaller projects to learn if this is the best match for those projects. You can customize your service and scale up or down as project demands change, as you gain expertise with your own data.

Types of AIaaS

Bots and digital assistance

This will include, for example, chat bots that use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that learn from human speech and mimic the patterns of language while providing responses. It frees customer service staff and lets them concentrate on more complicated activities. These are the forms of AIaaS most commonly used currently.

Cognitive computing APIs

Short for application programming interface, APIs are a means for developers to add a new feature or service without writing the code from scratch to the application they are building up. Popular API solutions include NLP, speech and computer vision, translation, knowledge mapping, search, and detection of emotions.

Machine learning frameworks 

These are methods that developers can use to build their own model, that learns from current organization data over time. Machine learning is often linked with big data but can also have other uses – and these frameworks offer a way to build in machine learning activities without the big data environment being needed.

Fully-managed machine learning services 

If machine learning frameworks are the first step towards machine learning, this alternative is a way to incorporate templates, pre-built models, and drag-and-drop tools to create a more customized machine learning system for developers.

AIaaS Vendors

The four major AIaaS providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, are quite well-known. Each vendor provides different types of bots, APIs, and machine learning frameworks, as well as full-managed machine learning options for all but IBM.

Many well-known technology firms, including Oracle, BMC and SalesForce, are starting to enter the competition.

There are numerous start-ups already working on different parts of AIaaS. This is the case in all industries; purchasing the smaller companies is not unusual for the bigger corporations to add the developed services to their portfolios.

The Position for AIaaS

AIaaS models will be vital for the implementation of AI. AIaaS greatly enhances business processes by providing analytical behaviors that are persistently learned and perfected by a machine. Knowledge obtained from specially-built algorithms allows organizations operate in ever more effective ways based on real-time, highly granular insights.

AIaaS is how the promise of AI can be understood, and how businesses will be changed for the better. Everything that once was a distant dream has come to life. It’s high time to embrace it.

This year has been very exciting year for cloud computing and it is only going to get bigger in the years ahead. It’s quite clear why businesses are preferring cloud computing; they are easier, affordable and it is easy to use cloud services of third-party rather than maintaining your own data centers on your own premises.

Due to the shift in cloud computing, businesses, irrespective of the size, have been allowed to access scalable resources, lower their IT costs, and cut down the on-site load of their IT infrastructure.

No matter what size, your business is the looming threat of hackers to steal information. So, in a situation like this, businesses should act responsibly and ought to be prepared when it comes to securing their data from hackers.

It is indeed possible to keep your data secured on a cloud, but there is no doubt that cyber-threats are evolving and cloud severs are their key target.

Here are a few tips on how you can safeguard your cloud security from cyber-attack!

Identify the risks first

The first and most important thing to do to prevent your business from a cyber-attack is by carefully scrutinizing the internal and external vulnerabilities your business encounters when it comes to hackers. What you need to do is prohibiting the way from where you think a hacker can gain entry into your system and that can be done by identifying your weaknesses. The most apt way to do it is to be informed about the several cyber fraud schemes and threats, such as malware, system hacking, phishing and various others that a business faces. Once you know your own vulnerabilities, you can handle them in the following ways.

Data Encryption

To date, encryption is the best way to protect the confidentiality and privacy of your data. Keep in mind that hackers are always looking for standard company-held information, whether they are bank-routing digits or employee social security numbers. So, remember to take measures to get this information encrypted. You can guard your information by switching to full-disk encryption tools which come by default with most of the operating systems. It should not take more than a minute to switch encryption of these devices on and all files on your drive will be encrypted without slowing down.

Moreover, end-to-end encryption ensures the best level of protection for secretive information and documents. As a result of end-to-end encryption, encryption is carried out on the client side so that files are encrypted before they leave your device and continue to be encrypted till they reach the supposed recipient.

Stronger Passwords and Authentication

This is the most common warning you must have heard a hundred times. But people give it a deaf ear and create easy-to-remember passwords, which is why their accounts get hacked. The most familiar source of cyber-attack is password prediction, yet it is the most preventable one. The tip is to think strategically when you create them. Moreover, keep changing the password often. Never try to reuse an old password or use the same password for various accounts. Do not keep any password in the cloud, or text file. Furthermore, complement your password with two-factor authentication requirement for accessing sensitive company information services.

Prefer Private Clouds

It would be extremely foolish to save a little amount of money and go for an inexpensive cloud. The reduced cost public clouds might look tempting, but they are frequently riddled with security threats and vulnerabilities. Although private clouds are expensive, they have minimal entry points and more stringent safety measures in place. Moreover, these private clouds are in a fairly good position to monitor your account while allowing them to preemptively deflect attacks and minimize their impact.

Protect Data Transfer Channels

The transference of data back and forth to the cloud travels through the internet which is where your data becomes the most vulnerable. Note that data must be encrypted in the cloud environment at all stages of transfer and storage.
So, be sure about the channels you pick for data transfer and make sure the data is encrypted before it is sent out anywhere. Protecting data transfer channels is a convenient way to prevent any sophisticated cyber-attacks which most of the people usually overlook.

Recognize Your Software Interfaces

ERP software applications are accessed through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) on the cloud. Any cloud developers should assure that the clients access the application through secure APIs which requires restricting the range of IP addresses or giving access only through corporate networks or VPNs. However, it is quite difficult to implement.

So, just to be sure yourself, perform the evaluation of the existing API to examine if there are any vulnerabilities. Analyze ways to boost it or you can simply switch to an API which is more secure.

Bottom Line

With cloud technology, where there are conveniences, there are certain types of risks as well.
By understanding and implementing these necessary steps, one can smartly safeguard one’s cloud security, and cyber-threats can be easily thwarted. If the cloud technology is dealt rightly, it can be the most cost-effective and securest place.

Companies of all sizes endorse virtualization as a means of cutting IT expenses, improving security and increasing operational efficiency. Even while people are already informed of the benefits, when it comes to the various types of virtualization, others are still in the dark.

While virtualization has its origins since the early 1960s, it gained enormous popularity between 2003-2010. It contributes to the evolution of the latest technologies trend, such as the cloud computing  data centers. Moreover, virtualization technology has been responsible to a certain extent for planting the seeds for cloud technology.

Here are some prominent benefits of virtualization:

• Flexible and efficient resource allocation.

• Pay per IT infrastructure use on demand.

• Improve development productivity.

• Reduce IT infrastructure costs.

• Allow multiple operating system processes.

• Fast scalability and remote access.

• Disaster recovery management

Now, we’ll show you some of the most popular types of virtualization and how they can be a game-changer for your business.

Application virtualization

This is a process where applications such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets are virtualized and delivered from a server to the end user’s device. So instead of logging into their workplace computers, users will be able to access the application directly from their device, provided there is an Internet connection. This is especially popular with businesses that need on-the-go use of their applications.

A remote application must run on a server, and some type of remote display protocol is used by the client to connect back to the client machine. Knowing that a vast number of system administrators and users have remote running experience, setting up remote displays for applications can be reasonably straightforward.

You may run one copy of the application on the server with a streaming application, and then have access to other client desktops, and run the streaming application locally. The update process becomes simpler while streaming the application, as you only set up another streaming application with the latest edition and have the end users refer to the application’s new version.

Server Virtualization

Virtualization of the server allows multiple virtual machines to function on one physical server. The virtual servers share the physical server resources, which contributes to optimal utilization of the resources of the physical servers. The resources the virtual machines share are CPU, storage, memory, and networking. All these tools are made available to the virtual machines via the physical hypervisor server.

The hypervisor is the physical box operating system and software. The virtual machine runs on the same box, independent of other virtual machines. Virtual machines can have differing modes of operation and are separated from one another.

The server virtualization is a means to combine applications that used to operate on separate physical servers, and now functions on the same physical server defined by virtual machines with the hypervisor software.

Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization helps the operating environment of the users to be stored centrally in the data center on a server. It allows the user to access their desktop directly from different machines from any location. Those who use specific operating systems apart from Windows Server require a virtual desktop. Key benefits of desktop virtualization are device mobility, functionality, updates and patches and simple software installation management.

Storage Virtualization

The process of grouping physical storage using software to represent what appears to be a single storage unit in a virtual environment is Storage Virtualization. Variables can be generated between storage virtualization and standard virtual machines, as both take and abstract access to physical hardware and resources.

A traditional virtual machine and a virtual storage are different from each other. The virtual machine is a series of files, while on the storage controller, which is created using software, virtual storage usually runs in memory.

For several years, a form of virtualization of storage has been implemented into the storage features. Features including Snapshots and RAID take and display physical disks in a virtual format. Such features may include a format to help with the performance or add resilience to the storage that is provided as a volume to the host.

Vendors of the storage array also implemented storage virtualization of their respective arrays within the operating system. This kind of virtualization of storage is called virtualization of the internal storage. Additionally, Veritas and several other storage vendors implement the external storage virtualization.

Hardware Virtualization

It is probably the most common type of virtualization nowadays; a virtual machine manager (VM) called the “hypervisor” makes hardware virtualization viable. The hypervisor produces virtual versions of computers and operating systems and consolidates them into one massive physical server, allowing for more efficient utilization of all hardware resources. Also, it helps users to run multiple operating systems concurrently on the same machine.