TECHNOLOGY

Best Practices for Business Success

Published

2 years ago

April 17, 2023

Max

Identity and access management (IAM) solutions significantly impact a company’s overall success.

Enterprises have been using it for years to navigate their digital transformation journey.

Most enterprises serving their customers across the globe are relying on conventional IAMs that may solve the fundamental identity challenges but are impotent when it comes to advanced threat vectors.

Whether it’s scalability-related concerns, security issues, or compliance, the traditional IAMs may not be the most appropriate fit for today’s digital business landscape, mainly when serving various customers online.

On the other hand, cutting-edge customer IAMs are revolutionizing how businesses cater to their customers on web platforms and applications. Let’s look at some aspects of the new-age customer IAM and how they’re helping businesses navigate the complexities of conventional IAMs.

IAM vs. Customer IAM – What’s the Basic Difference?

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A couple of years back, identity and access management were just managing employee identities and access within a closed network of an enterprise with less emphasis on security and user experience.

IAM aims to manage access to resources/systems within a network and serve hundreds or thousands of people. And thus, it was suitable for a limited number of people working under a single entity.

However, when we talk about managing millions or billions of customer identities, specific challenges are hard to address with traditional IAM since its capacity, security, and user experience aren’t up to the mark.

These IAM challenges include:

Non-Scalability: One of the significant issues with conventional IAMs is that they can’t be scaled beyond a specific limit. And thus, it can’t be used with systems that directly cater to customers through online platforms or mobile applications since they have to scale in real-time to serve a vast audience simultaneously.
Limited Security: Old IAM systems were designed for organizational use. Hence little emphasis was placed on security. But in the case of customer IAM, robust security should be the top priority since customer privacy and information security can’t be compromised.
Poor User Experience: Organizations leveraging the traditional IAMs aren’t concerned about the overall user experience since they use it for their employees. However, customer experience is one of the biggest game-changers when it comes to enhancing growth and increasing customer satisfaction.
Non-Compliance: Though most enterprises know that certain countries/states require enterprises to meet their privacy and data security regulations, many aren’t adhering to the same. On the other hand, customers are aware of their privacy and the importance of their data security. Hence, a robust customer IAM becomes the need of the hour.

Best Practices for Customer IAM in the Modern Digital Landscape

With time, organizations have learned that they must move beyond the conventional IAM and put their best foot forward in adopting a robust customer identity and access management solution.

As a result, most organizations incorporate cutting-edge CIAMs capable of solving the complex challenges of security, user experience, and scalability; many still face particular challenges with modern CIAM deployment.

Let’s look at these challenges and learn what organizations must consider while advancing toward a modern CIAM.

Best_Practices_for_Customer_IAM_in_the_Modern_Digital_Landscape .png

Auto-Scalable Infrastructure

If an enterprise is thinking of catering to millions of users online, it must have a robust auto-scalable infrastructure to meet its real-time demands.

Organizations may choose a scalable CIAM infrastructure suitable for a limited number of people or if the number of users is fixed. However, if they aren’t sure how many people would be authenticating or authorizing themselves, they must choose an auto-scalable CIAM infrastructure.

In today’s era, millions of people are using OTT and other similar platforms for entertainment. And their requests for resources and authentication scale in real-time. Hence, an auto-scalable CIAM becomes mandatory to cater to such huge demand.

Quick Platform Migration

One of the biggest challenges of shifting to a robust CIAM platform is migrating existing IAM data to the new platform.

The entire migration process could be hectic and require much time and resources. However, if businesses choose a smart CIAM that features quick migrations for customers with zero downtime

Also, new-age CIAMs support third-party integrations where enterprises can integrate third-party applications into the platform once the migration process is completed.

Adaptive Authentication for High-Risk Scenarios

While most CIAMs offer multi-factor authentication as a security measure, certain high-risk situations may require additional security measures.

Here’s where the critical role of adaptive authentication comes into play.

Adaptive authentication automatically detects unusual authentication behavior and adds another layer to improve overall account security.

This helps improve customer data security even if one or two authentication parameters are compromised.

To Conclude

The conventional IAM could be a good option for managing identities within an organization, but it can’t solve the challenges of modern customer identity management.

On the other hand, customer identity and access management (CIAM) have revolutionized how businesses deliver secure and seamless user experiences to their customers.

Businesses thinking of thriving growth shouldn’t ignore the importance of incorporating a modern CIAM solution that can offer the features mentioned above.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

11 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

11 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

11 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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