TECHNOLOGY
Unveiling the Resiliency Rules with Data First Mindset
In this fast-paced business landscape, the Resiliency Rules serve as the compass guiding us through uncharted waters.
As unexpected disruptions and constant challenges become the norm, companies must adapt to not just survive but thrive. A recent study conducted by analytics leader SAS has cast a spotlight on the state of business resiliency, and the findings are illuminating.
The SAS Resiliency Rules Report delves deep into the world of business resiliency across diverse industries – from financial services to retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and government. The study reached out to 2,414 senior executives from companies with over 100 employees. What makes this study particularly intriguing is the stark contrast it reveals: a staggering 97% of these executives consider resiliency to be either very or somewhat important. Yet, when asked about their own companies, only 47% perceive them as resilient. These findings piqued my curiosity.
I had the privilege of hosting Jay Upchurch, CIO at SAS, to delve into the essence of resiliency and how enterprises can harness the Resiliency Rules framework to strengthen their data-first mindset and embrace uncertainty.
Jay, the recipient of the 2022 Carolina Global CIO of the Year Award and a Stevie Award in the technology sector, has a unique journey at SAS. Starting as an intern in the late ’90s and returning four and a half years ago, Jay now holds a dual role as CIO and oversees SAS Cloud’s commercial business. His mission? Empower the enterprise by removing barriers to innovation and ensuring customers can easily adopt and operate SAS technology to unlock their curiosity and drive data-driven insights.
SAS, founded in 1976 at NC State University with a focus on statistical analysis for agriculture, has evolved into the world’s largest privately held software company, generating $3 billion in annual revenue, and boasting a strong presence in AI analytics.
What resonates with me deeply are SAS‘s corporate values, which emphasize curiosity, accountability, authenticity, and the ethical use of data. These values set the stage for our enlightening conversation.
Our discussion commenced with the very definition of resiliency. Jay encapsulated it perfectly: “Resiliency isn’t an individual effort; it’s a collective endeavor. Organizations must embrace a set of Resiliency Rules to foster a resilient mindset. Think of these rules as the foundation of a strong house. They build upon each other to create a resilient culture.”
Here are the key insights from our conversation:
1. Many organizations recognize the resiliency gap between the importance they place on resiliency and their actual resilience levels, highlighting the need to address this gap.
2. We delved into the Five Resiliency Rules Framework and discussed why each is fundamental to build the resiliency.Speed and Agility: Respond swiftly to change.Innovation: Strive to create a better world.
Equity and Responsibility: Apply ethical standards.
Data Culture and Literacy: Make data-driven decisions.
Curiosity: Foster exploration and innovation.
3. Jay mentioned four key elements related to a strong data culture that help companies better adapt to market changes:
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Data-First Mindset: A strong data culture begins with a data-first mindset. This means that everyone in the organization should prioritize data in their decision-making processes. When faced with a question or challenge, the instinctive response should be to inquire about the data: Where is it? What does it say? This mindset should be pervasive across all departments and lines of business.
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Data Hygiene: Data hygiene refers to the quality and cleanliness of data. Having good data hygiene involves maintaining well-structured data, clear data dictionaries, and the ability to access data in a timely manner. Ensuring that the data reflects reality accurately is crucial for making informed decisions.
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Data Governance: Data governance involves establishing controls and safeguards for data access and usage. While a data-first mindset encourages widespread data access, it’s also important to have policies and controls in place to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with regulations.
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Responsible Use of Data: Responsible data use is a critical aspect of a strong data culture. It involves using data ethically and avoiding bias. Data should be utilized for positive and constructive purposes, and organizations should actively work to prevent unintended biases in data analysis and decision-making.
As organizations recognize the gap between the importance of resilience and their actual readiness, it’s clear that we must act collectively to bridge this divide. The Five Resiliency Rules and the four key elements of a strong data culture provide a comprehensive framework for building resilience and adapting to market changes.
My conversation with Jay Upchurch, CIO at SAS, has been enlightening, emphasizing the significance of curiosity, accountability, authenticity, and the ethical use of data in the journey to resilience.
Let’s embrace these Resiliency Rules and empower our organizations to not only survive but also flourish in the face of challenges.
Watch the CXO Spice here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-Nc4yzqYs&t=58s
Check out your resiliency quotient via Resiliency Assessment Tool
Together, we’ll chart a course towards a future defined by resilience and innovation.
TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
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.
TECHNOLOGY
HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces
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.
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.
TECHNOLOGY
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
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.
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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