Privacy is self-evident natural law – it is deeply linked to individual dignity – and is a cornerstone of freedom.

Why the internet lacks privacy

The Internet was developed originally as a government, academic and research network on dedicated private telephone circuits. There was no perceived need to consider or anticipate security and privacy as critical components.

It was not until the Internet was opened to commercial traffic that ubiquitous connectivity was allowed and the Internet became accessible to everyone. Good manners prevailed on the Internet until after 1995 when the first malware began to appear.

It was too late; the Internet had been established and improved without security and privacy. Internet adoption was by then a revolutionary firestorm that could not be checked.  Privacy was perceived important but not fully understood; the technologies to achieve it did not exist. It was generally believed that incremental improvements would solve the privacy problems.  That has not worked out as hoped.

Early growth pains

As the Internet was becoming commercial in the late 1990s a new security industry was born to defend against the increasing barrage of invasive communications. It was just coming of age in 2001 when 9/11 occurred and security hysteria became rampant.

This historical coincidence imprinted the nascent security efforts with a defensive “gates, guards and guns” culture and made privacy a dirty word – imposing a conflicted birthmark on the Internet that continues to hamper privacy efforts to this day.

At the same time, Google and others were pioneering the mining of all customer traffic for marketing purposes. To do so, they pushed privacy aside completely, making the visibility of all content and user information crucial to their commercial business model.

This cleared the floodgates for the exploding social networking movement which can only operate if it ignores privacy.

Privacy is different than security

“Internet Privacy” is the seclusion of information in transit and at rest.

A good analogy is the diplomatic pouch that moves from sender to recipient with its contents locked in total seclusion.

“Internet Security” is defending against external threats.

The many companies in the security industry accept the Internet’s protocol weaknesses as they are, defending the fortress with malware blockers, firewalls and other expensive battlements. It now operates entirely in a combat mentality; fighting never-ending battles in wars it can never win (in fact, it is falling way behind.) Today, standard desktop antivirus solutions are less than 50% effective against the total range of common threats.

The small incremental security improvements that have evolved have had a marginally protective effect; but have come at a very high cost ($3.5 billion annual losses worldwide), without delivering any privacy.  Today, you can buy a lot of security and not achieve privacy at all.

Security and privacy are not mutually exclusive – we can have both.

Government impediments to privacy

Governments have always been conflicted over privacy. While they may have some legitimate needs to communicate their secrets privately, they work diligently to deny private communications to everyone else – always behind the handy excuse of national security. In spite of watchdog and judicial efforts to curb invasive behavior, government agencies are now running amok with illegal snooping programs, domestic and foreign.

To many, it appears that we have now come full cycle from the constitutional framers’ original intentions in the Fourth Amendment to protect individual privacy from an invasive government (writs and general warrants, imposed by the British before 1791 and widely detested). We now have a new era of convoluted regulations and clandestine maneuvers that are arguably the de-facto restoration of the invasive writs and warrants.

Add in National Security Letters and other circumventions of prior privacy laws, and the picture gets uglier.  These new assaults on privacy have been legitimized by creeping pre-9/11 regulations and post-9/11 terrorism hysteria, and driven home by widespread government dystopian behavior.

Online privacy enforcement

There is no practical way for laws to enforce privacy on the Internet. We already have dozens of laws that impose penalties for privacy breaches, but very few that require privacy be integral to communications. HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley and a few other laws require that certain industries take the reasonable steps necessary to secure medical, financial and other records. This has resulted in content encryption but that alone does not ensure privacy.

There is no evidence that fining corporations or jailing violators for online privacy breaches (the current basis for all privacy laws) is the least bit effective. An accidental breach like a misplaced laptop can compromise thousands of personal records, for which the corporation at fault is fined heavily, but the exposed victims are simply out of luck.

Once private information is compromised, no law or penalty can restore it to privacy status, or make the victims whole.

Summary

The Internet is in a painful adolescence, stuck with security-flawed protocols and questionable belief systems that stand in the way of privacy.

The Internet’s security-flawed protocols can be rendered safer with more advanced technology. But, the real challenges in deploying effective privacy will be in overcoming the hide-bound cultural issues from two decades of established government interests, commercial exploitation and a highly protectionist security industry that appears myopic about privacy.

Until 9/11 there had been strong enforcement of the rights of privacy across two centuries of privacy legislation and more than 300 privacy court cases.  Those rights are now under siege on many fronts and have increasingly fewer protections under law.  Overall, the space is highly fragmented and confused; the only hope lies in advanced technologies that provide truly private solutions – transcending the need for increasingly expensive security defenses and legislative or judicial struggles.

References:

Harry Kalven, Jr. Law and Contemporary Problems Vol. 31, No. 2, Privacy (Spring, 1966), Duke University School of Law    http://www.jstor.org/stable/1190675

… our still vivid experiences with totalitarianism remind us that a major tactic for the dictator is to subjugate by eliminating privacy.  I start, therefore, from the premise that privacy is surely deeply linked to individual dignity and the needs of human existence …

Daniel J. Solove,  Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between
Privacy and Security    (Yale University Press 2011)

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”       Cardinal Richelieu

George Sidman is a serial entrepreneur with a number of software and Internet companies to his credit.  For the past fifteen years he has been focused on highly private communications solutions and holds two patents for Internet privacy technologies.  He is the CEO of TrustWrx, a Silicon Valley Internet security company.

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Quantum computing has become a very hot topic the last few years, promising the kind of speed and compute power that some believe could make encryption obsolete. If true, that would obviously present a clear and present danger to existing security solutions. Many security vendors that use single layer encryption have responded to this worry by stating that their products are safe from a quantum attack, without offering the requisite proof. Unlike other vendors, at TrustWrx, our solution is built around a unique three-layer cryptography that defeats decryption attacks. Not only do we believe our present solution is safe today from quantum attacks, we can prove it.

Furthermore, new quantum-immune encryption algorithms are in the works and will be available long before quantum computers become commercially viable. When the new algorithms become available, they will easily plug into the TrustWrx architecture. For the past few years the pundits have predicted that commercially available quantum computing is about a decade away, and nobody has yet predicted a shortening of that timing – many consider it too aggressive.

The primary virtue of quantum computing is that it promises to be orders of magnitude faster than standard CMOS  computing. However, quantum processor speed alone is not enough; other considerable technical constraints get in the way of quantum computing being a threat to present and future forms of cryptography.

Here are the primary reasons why quantum computing is not a near-term or long-term threat to cryptography.

1. Rudimentary Hardware Platforms A true quantum computer does not yet exist at commercial scale. The D-Wave 2000Q is the only commercially available “quantum computer” on the market today. However, it is more precisely described as an early stage “quantum annealer”, a primitive first step towards true quantum computing. (Quantum annealing will never be able to run Shor’s algorithm, which purportedly breaks common forms of contemporary cryptography.) Obviously, owning and operating such a computer is beyond the means of most organizations.

The D-Wave 2000Q                       This technology cannot crack any encryption.

a. Cost:                                        A cool US $15 million.

b. Size:                                        A ten-foot cube, requiring more than 1,000 cubic feet.

c. Processor capacity:                    2,000 qubits (The industry believes that commercial                                                         viability will require upwards of one million qubits.)

d. Operating environment:            The D-Wave 2000Q processor resides in a high vacuum                                                    environment in which the pressure is 10 billion times                                                        lower than atmospheric pressure and operates at a                                                          temperature that is approximately 180 times colder                                                          than  interstellar space.

e. Management:                          Requires a front-end silicon-based CMOS server, with                                                       standard operating systems, code and operating speeds.

2. Quantum mechanics is imprecise – but cryptography demands bit-level precision. This issue is the main impediment to decryption attacks from quantum computing.

Qubit computations are highly unstable and error-prone, limiting them to short and simple calculations; producing imprecise results. Reliable error correction techniques will require large quantities of qubits; have proven to be elusive and have yet to overcome quantum noise and other quantum-decoherence phenomena to produce reliably repeatable results. As a consequence, quantum computing remains probabilistic rather than deterministic.

However, cryptography must be 100% bit-perfect; a one-bit deviation anywhere will fail a key match to an encrypted file or finding the prime factor of an integer (Shor’s algorithm attack). The fundamental nature of quantum mechanics will keep qubit-error rates above zero percentile acceptable levels for a decryption attack, simply because the shift of a single bit, or qubit, in the encrypted file, the test key or the calculation, will render the test key a no-match to decrypt the encrypted file. It is therefore statistically unlikely that a quantum-based key test against an encrypted file will ever return a 100% deterministic result. Without bit-level precision all quantum cryptography attacks will fail.

3. No quantum-speed memory or circuitry: Quantum persistent memory and quantum-speed circuitry does not exist and is anticipated only theoretically. The reality is that long term memory persistence and quantum decoherance are mutually exclusive. This means that all quantum computation must swap data and code commands through standard CMOS memory and circuitry, constraining quantum processes to snippets of quantum-chip-resident code and data, and performance dependent on classical network I/O and CMOS execution speeds, while trying to overcome the noise and decoherance of quantum mechanics. To date, the predicted fast performance of quantum calculations have remained largely theoretical, with limited real-world proof.

4. CPU performance constraints: The primary quantum threat to cryptography is the high-speed brute-force testing of guessed keys against an encrypted file, or finding the prime factor of an integer. This is an automated process that succeeds only when the test returns plain text. This CPU data-intensive analysis problem exceeds the capacity of current quantum processors by orders of magnitude, requiring constant off-board CMOS memory and standard operating system I/O processes. Therefore, the data swap performance constraints will throttle the testing of keys or the search for the prime factor of an integer.

Post Quantum Cryptography

In anticipation of quantum cryptography attacks, many Post Quantum Cryptography initiatives have sprung up to develop advanced encryption algorithms that will be quantum immune. A recent NIST program has solicited proposals for new algorithms and is considering 26 candidates; all that purport to be immune to quantum attacks. When these new methods become standards, TrustWrx will simply adopt them and imbed them within our technology.

CONCLUSION — NO THREAT

Quantum computing remains largely theoretical and is advancing at a pace constrained by extreme operating environments, high costs, the total lack of equivalent-speed memory and circuitry, dependency on slow front-end CMOS management, and the imprecise nature of quantum computing results. Many very expensive and very serious R&D operational and equipment challenges have yet to be overcome. After more than ten years of extremely expensive research and development the best technology to date is a 2,000-qubit processor that operates in an environment 100 times more hostile than deep space and costs $15 million. The gorilla in the problem is the probabilistic, rather than deterministic, nature of quantum mechanics that may well exclude quantum computing from being effective at cracking current or future cryptography.

George Sidman, CEO
Status Report on the First Round of the NIST Post-Quantum
Cryptography Standardization Process
https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8240/final
Quantum Computing – Progress and Prospects (2019)
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25196/quantum-computing-progress-and-prospects

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Over the last several months we have been discussing the post-COVID comeback strategies and priorities with our top retail customers and one thing has come out clear and certain – “Retail in the post-COVID era will never be the same again.”

The fear unleashed by the corona virus pandemic has shuttered retail stores across the globe. This has led to retailers looking for ways to ensure business continuity and make up for losses that have happened over the last few months. As governments mandate people to stay indoors and the chances of stores re-opening is still a matter of contention, it is natural that consumers will turn to online shopping. It is imperative for retailers therefore, to give a serious thought to digital channels as the dominant distribution channel for the next few months until the pandemic subsides. Based on secondary research and customer sentiments gleaned first-hand, here are some of the technology trends that are expected to unravel in retail in the near future.

1. Digital First Approach:

COVID has brought about a significant change in the consumer mindset and shopping patterns. Online traffic to supermarket sites grew a whopping 135 % in the week ending April 26. To survive and compete in these uncertain times, retailers must adopt a digital first approach in all their crucial business operations. E-commerce was slated to slated to double by 2023, but the pandemic has accelerated this growth leaving retailers no option but to quickly scale their offerings by adopting a digitally enhanced and responsive omnichannel strategy. Retailers of the who did not have the foresight to grow their eCommerce skills fear missing the bus unless they quickly reorganize their business and really embrace an agile start-up mindset and ways of working that go with that.

2. Rise of retail tech companies:

Not surprinsgly, the online traffic to “retail-tech” websites has also grown by a staggering 128.4% in the week ending April 26. This points to the fact that retailers are pursuing the digital transformation journey in earnest to cater to the changing consumer behaviour. The retail tech landscape is populated with companies that are changing the way retailers connect, engage and drive a digital revolution in retail. Retail tech companies provide solutions for modernizing instore operations, boost supply chain efficiency and enhance customer experience. In a bid to attract customers to their stores, large retailers are collaborating with technology companies to provide exclusive in-store experience to customers that will result in better brand recall.

3. Need for integrated inventory management:

In an omnichannel world customers expect an integrated experience across all devices and channels. Retailers therefore need to adopt an omnichannel retail strategy along with an enterprise-wide inventory management system to remain profitable. As the economies re-open, stores will become spaces to enhance customer experience, arrange in-store pick-up and conduct reverse logistics. Forrester Research reported that close to one-third of U.S. adults prefer the “click and collect” option to avoid a wasted trip to the store. Concept stores such as the Nova store from Alert Robotics have introduced   automation and robotics in the warehouse to efficiently fulfil online orders. By making use of loyalty apps customers can buy their regular items from their devices which are retrieved and packed in the warehouse by robots and ready for pickup.  The customers still have the option to browse and buy items from the storefront. This makes a perfect blend of an engaging experience and time-saving opportunity for busy shoppers. Therefore, technology will enable retailers offer an integrated experience to customers by monitoring, refreshing, and restocking inventory in real-time and keeping a check on variations in pricing and SKU movement.

4. Adherence to social distancing norms:

The after-effect of COVID will last for a long time, but that does not mean people will shun the idea of going out and shopping altogether. It is the responsibility of the retailers to provide their customers a safe environment to shop and have a pleasant experience. Digital transformation will have a greater role to play inensuring social distancing norms are followed without having to engage extra personnel and complicated guidelines. Technology can help protect customers and frontline staff by effectively managing the venue capacity.

Technology companies have offered solutions that include the use of sensors and people counters to alert staff where maximum capacity has been reached. Hughes Systique’s Intelligent Monetization Platform (IMP), which is an intelligence layer that sits alongside the store’s existing infrastructure such as Wi-Fi and cameras, helps monitor adherence of social distancing through its zone-based analytics and creates live heat maps are which are displayed on digital displays and can alert store personnel to take remedial action.

5. Contactless Tech is a Post-COVID Retail must-have:

“Contactless” will be the new normal in retail and technology companies will help retailers achieve this through multiple technologies. Retailers are of the opinion that once lockdown eases customers will avoid crowded stores and will prefer contactless shopping. Augmented and virtual reality is expected to gain importance as a preferred technology in retail. For instance, furniture supplier WoodenStreet is all set to provide customers a virtual tour of their home decorated with furniture and decor from their collection. Users can get virtual tours from their homes with the help of 3D visualization about the different furniture setups. This is to ensure that physical visits can be minimized, and users can get an in-store experience right from their home. Following the Amazon Go example, 7-Eleven, a popular Convenience Store giant has begun cashier-less, check-out free store at its corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas.

Contactless payment technology has been pushed to the mainstream due to COVID as the potential of contamination at point-of-sale systems is a driving factor according to a recent Mastercard Survey. As customers are gravitating towards contactless payments, retailers are collaborating with technology companies to begin introducing packaged APIs that can connect with mobile apps and enable smaller and mid-sized retailers to offer app-based contactless payments.

COVID 19 has disrupted the retail sector and has brought about a sea change in the way consumers shop. To keep with these changing times, retailers will adopt new-age technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, 3D printing, AR & VR and Robotics to ensure that not only they comply with the laws but are also able to give confidence to customers.

References:

• https://www.mytotalretail.com/article/10-reasons-retail-will-never-be-the-same-post-covid-19-part-1/
• https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/articles/big-adapting-ahead-for-retailers-striving-to-succeed-in-post-covid-19/
• https://www.retaildive.com/news/will-covid-19-push-contactless-payments-into-the-mainstream/578076/
• https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/future-of-retail-is-omnichannel-contactless-tech-driven-say-retailers-5230811.html
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherwalton/2020/05/15/contactless-is-retails-new-must-have-safe-word-but-knowing-how-best-to-use-it-is-easier-said-than-done/#5f54daed4758
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105486/coronavirus-traffic-impact-industry/

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It’s the end of the business world as we know it…And the beginning of new opportunities to harness the superior digital technology the era has to offer.

When the world welcomed 2020 with the usual high expectations and hope for the New Year, no one could have known that, not even three months later, the way business was done, and the way humans interacted, was to change fundamentally.

Yet, as abnormal as the “new normal” may still seem to the business world right now, the outbreak of a global pandemic did not only close many doors, it also opened up a host of new ones that will ultimately lead to the way business is done in future, perhaps even more efficiently than ever before.

Because of the Government’s directives on social distancing and the need to work remotely and without contact with other individuals, many companies have had to adopt new technology. In some situations, businesses have had to map out an entirely new digital journey for customers, from scratch.

Chart your customer’s digital journey

Some companies have had no choice but to adapt to the new way of doing business practically overnight, but for most, their pandemic and post-pandemic strategies are still in the fledgling stage. In preparation for the eventuality of being back to “business as usual”, with a semblance of how it was just six short months ago, companies need to consider that it is not only going to be another new situation for themselves but for their customers too.’

With the customer at the epicentre of any successful business, the journey ahead – which is inevitably a digital one – must be made as seamless and simple as possible for them. In not doing so, companies stand the risk of alienating – or altogether losing – their existing customer base.

Countless questions

That said, there are many considerations to be made.

If you as a business can put yourself in your customers’ shoes and take a retrospective look at how they were used to doing business “then” (pre-COVID 19), walk the journey forward into how it is going to be done going forward, and then say the terrain felt only slightly different, you have won. If the details around a product used to be communicated face-to-face, in-person – how is that communication going to take place now? How will the same service, with the same response and turnaround time, be delivered without any physical interaction?

As it is the aim of any business that a deal that starts with communication, ends in a transaction – it also needs to be considered how businesses will take payments. Customers can be left feeling frustrated if they are unable to pay through their chosen payment method, bearing in mind that some customers may be uncomfortable paying services or products over the internet. How can customers be assured a business has sufficient safety measures in place?

If the nature of business means it must send contracts back and forth, how will this be done now?

Digital direction

All these questions have one umbrella answer: digital transformation.

And fortunately, in this digital age, companies have an arsenal of technology at their disposal to help them effectively plan and successfully execute their digital transformation.

Take away the dated manual ways of doing things – the paper, the printers, the scanners, the couriers, the wasted time – and replace them with digital processes.

Need customer communication that is remote, yet personal and unintimidating – fast, efficient and professional? Communications and transactions that are watertight when it comes to security, offer peace of mind? Legal contracts and documents that cannot be tampered with?

All these problems can be solved using the right digital technology.

The more prepared and better advised a business is digitally, the faster it can go forward into the “new normal” future we all face. Daunting as that sounds, it is more opportunity than ominous. Just harness the technology already at hand.

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COVID has brought human life and business to a standstill. While we try to figure out how to adapt to this unprecedented situation, companies are trying to navigate the uncertainties to understand how to operate and sell in the “New Normal”. And when businesses are struggling to operate and sell, marketing has not much to do. This is a common perception. But is it so? No, Marketing as a function becomes very critical, during and post COVID scenarios. Marketing will change from what it is today to a more evolved function. What and how we market our services, solutions and the company will decide the future of the organization.

Focus on Customer empathy: As per a recent survey, 76% of consumers have recently picked up new habits, behaviours, and routines in the wake of COVID-19. Of those people, 89% said they plan on keeping some of their new habits. Consumers are also trying new products, with 36% planning to continue using new brands they have tried after COVID-19. The market is changing, the consumers are changing, and therefore the businesses must change and adapt. Marketing as a function needs to drive research and create insights to create an empathetic view of consumers’ psychology for organizations to adapt their services and solutions to meet the current and future requirements and needs of the customer and the market.

Taking a Futuristic Approach: Marketing will need to take a futuristic approach and understand the requirement of it’s end customer post-COVID situation and build its narrative on those lines. The way markets and industries are operating is going to change drastically. The marketing functions need to deep dive to understand the future of industries and the different factors and disruptions in play. Will digital play an important role? Will travel return to what it was? Will organic products dominate the market? Will the production shift base from China? Getting answers to such questions will help marketers design their strategies. So look at the future with a new lens and ask the question that will lead to the answers you seek.

Leading with Digital Marketing: Scientists are predicting that some form of social distancing may need to happen until 2022. That’s a long time to put any marketing on hold. A more important consideration is the fact that the pandemic will have a long-term effect on the psyche and outlook of consumers. One of COVID-19 study found that 86% of Americans and 81% of Canadians agreed that the crisis would create a new normal and have a lasting impact on society. Digital Marketing, therefore, will become the primary channel for marketing. More and more brick and mortar stores will turn to digital marketing to reach out to their customers. Non-traditional channels, like influencer marketing, product placements, video series sponsorships, will take the front seat. Channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo will be the go-to platforms.

Drafting the “Right” Narrative: Finally, storytelling will become critical to a brand’s success. The role of a storyteller has become tricky in the COVID era. The story, not the product, will become vital. “How” and “Why” will become more significant than “What”. The art of storytelling will be driving information through all channels and mediums. Thought leadership and points of views will reflect companies’ thoughts and approach towards the COVID situation and will create brand perceptions among consumers. Marketers must develop authentic, empathetic, and transparent stories as much as possible. This is the time to listen and forward and provide as much value as possible to your customers and communities using meaningful and Mindful content.

Define your Brand – Brand identity and marketing brand values will become the core of messaging. “Who are you” is going to be more relevant to customers than “what you sell”. For Instance, “Happiest Minds is a Mindful Company who cares about its employees and customer” is what a customer will relate to more, verses that “Happiest Minds is an IT company”. Personas, messaging, and even product strategies may need to evolve for the realities of the post-COVID-19 world significantly. And we will need to walk the talk. Actions speak louder than words, and therefore a brand must be empathetic and real to its customers. They need to be mindful, to say that they are mindful. Therefore, Marketing becomes more of a Human function to drive a brand to do things in a more meaningful and mindful manner.

Data-Driven Marketing: CMOs are hesitant to engage consumers in research at this time. But as per Gartner’s Frances Russell, many marketers who have deployed surveys specifically about COVID-19’s impact on customer experience have seen actionable responses. Customers should be approached with conversational studies, seeking their help in creating insightful data which would be helpful to understand the human impact of the pandemic. Fresh data and accurate insights have never been more critical. In these uncharted territories, relying on instincts alone is dangerous. Therefore, reaching out to the customers to understand their current challenge and needs will be very helpful to marketing as a function and to organizations as a whole, to navigate the unprecedented times and create meaningful solutions and services.

Making marketing agile: As the impact of COVID continues to unfold, Marketing needs to be on top of things, researching, understanding and adapting to changes, to cater to the consumers’ needs and emotions. They need to be quick in articulating messages, story, and agile in pushing it out to the right customer. Marketing cannot afford to take months to design campaigns and messages. They need to act soon and act now, in terms of research, communication, brand building and more.

No more ‘Just A Sales’ function: Marketing historically has been considered a sub-function of sales. But with disruptions in business, marketing will evolve to play a more significant role in Brand Building, CSR Initiatives, Customer Care and Employee Care. While Marketing continues to play the part of the lead generator, the focus will be to build 360 communications, to create a holistic view of company’s vision and mission and stitch it together with the offerings, objectives and markets to target.

Marketing to your employees: Internal communication will become a big part of the marketing function. Marketeer will be required to create a communication plan to build trust among employees, and articulate and communicate the initiatives, success stories, message from leadership in a manner that creates goodwill. The marketing strategies and initiatives should help companies create a symbiotic and connected ecosystem for all to work and contribute towards company goals and objectives.

While it’s essential to recognize the uncertainties and fears surrounding COVID-19, don’t let this crisis paralyze you. Enabling the team to understand customers and act based on timely insights is key to navigating the way through this crisis both for the marketing team and the company. Let’s all take a more humane approach to marketing, keeping our customers, employees and society first.

About the Author

Pragya Sugandha– Sr. Manager, Marketing, Digital Services at Happiest Minds. With 10+ years of experience in marketing, she likes to seek challenging position that needs innovation, creativity and dedication. Her areas of expertise lie in Digital Marketing, Marketing Communication and strategy, Content Marketing, Sales Enablement, Lead Generation and Vendor Management. In her free time, Pragya likes to paint, write and travel.

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By Conor Brosnan, Marketing Communications North America, Flowrox Inc

It’s no secret that Covid 19 has affected businesses globally, something that hasn’t happened via a virus since the Spanish Flu of 1918. Unlike 1918 however, we are much more digitally advanced and dependent on technology in 2020. With our enhanced knowledge and reliance on all things digital, we are truly better equipped to handle this virus with respect to keeping industrial operations up and running. One huge and probably the largest advantage, is the connection we can form between multiple machines by utilizing a mobile monitoring system.

IoT, or Internet of Things, is one of the clearest indications that at least when it comes to digital applications anywhere, we are in the golden age of monitoring. Industry Week 50’s Peter Fretty writes “As the pipeline connecting and collecting mountains of data from an entire spectrum of equipment and devices, IoT continues steady progression as more companies embark on their journey. “

IoT connects devices from all over to provide critical data for example, a manufacturing plant. With IoT’s capabilities you can ensure that all your machines are connected and working in sync. You can also find out which exact machine is lagging behind the others and optimize it or replace it.

The beauty of IIoT, Industrial internet of Things, yes IoT with a focus on industrial plants and processes, is the fact that almost every company worker utilizes the internet, which means that any and all information from the machines can be viewed and adjusted away from the office. Right now is a perfect example of companies who do have something like this implemented, who are able to focus on their work, while the ones that don’t, are scrambling to find out how they’re going to keep their machines running at full capacity while being away from their site. Others are simply risking exposure just to keep their company’s at peak performance.

Rob Mesirow, who heads the PwC Connected IoT sector says, “It’s also important to note the most popular IoT use cases so manufacturers can better guide their own deployment plans. The main use cases are in logistics (50%), supply chain (47%), employee and customer experience (46%), and predictive maintenance (41%).” (Industry Week 50)

Predictive maintenance is something that is now more than ever expected to be precise and almost as importantly, time sensitive. If the vibration on a bearing is ignored, your repair costs go from a few hundred dollars for a new bearing, to a few thousand for a new pump, even more depending on the size. With ramifications like that it’s important you know right away if something is wrong, which is almost impossible to do without a monitoring system measuring the vibration.

One large aspect of predictive maintenance is the specificity of that notification. There are systems that can tell you which exact bearing is vibrating too much. There is no need for constant inspection and worrying -if the bearing needs to be fixed, you will be notified. Getting the notification will help you prepare as much as you can to get the problem taken care of.

Connecting all machines and devices will give your company the ability to view the variables that they know are important to the success of their plant, and ultimately make a decision based on the scope of the plant or project and not simply one machine.

Some machines have monitoring devices but without connecting them to an intelligent analytics, you may be missing out on profits stemming from your system not working as efficiently.  You may even think your plant is working at high efficiency, but you will not know until you can monitor all devices separately, together at once.

Doing this allows you to find out what part of your cement process, or food process, or wastewater process is giving what specific machine trouble; and more importantly when in the process. Having a 30% increase in production, or 30% decrease in waste can garner a company thousands if not hundreds of thousands in revenue over just one year of production.

The future will yield more and more companies committed to building some frequency of teleworking into their employment plans –both for routine and emergency situations. As part of this, forward-thinking, companies are updating and perfecting their preparedness plans to include mobile solutions to in-person problems. One of these solutions is an IIoT monitoring capable of providing real time data, detailed alerts, and can display 3-dimensional models of the plant as well as all of its components. Click the link below if you would like to learn more.

To know more…

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My grandfather was a simple man without a formal university education, but he had wisdom. The world has not changed in many ways since his day. Today the world is profoundly similar although new risks exist that he never imagined. He was very vocal on professing safety to his precocious grandson, who seemed hell-bent to own fast cars and motorcycles. He used to say, “if you can imagine it, you can prevent it.” That is sage advice. Non-natural disasters are not accidents; they are preventable. Consider only a few from the past 40 years, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Corona Virus, Boeing 737 Max, and data breaches. All were preventable.

A recent Cisco survey reported that 71 percent of Americans are worried about having their personal or financial information hacked. Sixty-seven percent of Americans are concerned about being a victim of identity theft. 1.76 billion records have been stolen or leaked in 2020 alone.

In my grandfather’s day, data was just numbers and letters. Today, data is who we are. It reveals our behavior, character, loyalties, secrets, and intentions. In the wrong hands’ data becomes a weapon, betraying its owner. Our challenge as a cybersecurity industry is to restore confidentiality, save lives, ensure privacy, and promote national prosperity. To achieve our goal, we must understand the motivations and economy of cybercriminals.

The single most massive unified threat against the United States is China. They openly acknowledge their unabated aggression to compete and win in the digital economy. From their perspective, they are not stealing our data; we are giving it to them! But China is not alone in this economy. Russia and other international cybercriminals see our data, lack of privacy, and lack of security as their source of income.

In December 2019, the New York Times used cell phone data to track President Donald Trump in Florida when he was with Japan’s Prime Minister Abe. All members of the President’s Secret Service protection and advance team are known. The critical point is, all data is essential, has value to someone, and that data needs permanent protection by its owner.

After every data breach, a panel of experts investigates and publishes their findings and recommendations. Not surprisingly, the experts find what they are looking for. The root causes are always network defense failures and failure to stop data exfiltration. Most of us casually agree with them, persisting in clinging to our bias that the defense always loses. After all, the adversarial offense has the advantage – time to prepare, time to attack, method of attack, point of assault, and stealth. The victimized defense is incapable of protecting its broad attack surface entirely 100% of the time. Advantage offense!

• 2015 – US Office of Personnel Management data breach exposed personal information of nearly 26M people, including biometrics, security clearances, and financial data.
• 2018 – US Postal Service lost 60M customer records (1/5th of the US population)!
• 2 Feb 2020 – FBI arrests Raytheon Missile Systems engineer after giving laptop with sensitive missile defense technology to China
• 10 Feb 2020 – US Department of Justice charged four Chinese military officers for the $800M Equifax hack
• Feb 2020 – 1100 open FBI investigations of China digital espionage

The good news is we have reached a tipping point, and the advantage is moving to the defense. A new data protection market segment is emerging that is focused entirely on self-protection. Less than 15 years ago, cloud computing was universally rejected as an immature and insecure computing concept for the Federal government. Today, it is the preferred secure computing solution, even for our nation’s most highly classified data. Similarly, after a decade of research, self-protecting data technology has demonstrated that data breaches can be prevented by doing more than straight encryption (i.e., denying unauthorized access). This new technology is capable of actively equipping files, messages, and physical hard drives to independently defend themselves from exploitation without any external defense. This means that the penalty to the criminal will exceed the value of the data – and they will look for softer targets.

As this technology achieves ubiquity in every application, mobile device, and web service, the soft targets will begin to disappear. The promise of this new market segment is the restoration of privacy, security, and national prosperity for all.
This new market segment promises to achieve two disruptive changes to the entire cybersecurity market. First, it will no longer matter if data is stolen because the data can protect and defend itself according to pre-programmed defensive measures. Second, the cost of data protection will be less than 1/1000th the cost of current data security approaches. CISO’s, CTO’s and CFO’s love to hear those words, but their Board of Directors and insurers are even more thrilled by their reduced risk exposure.

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Organizations are moving over to SharePoint Online to leverage the modern user experience it offers through the latest Office 365 features. SharePoint Online is also evolving and improving constantly, giving users the provision to modernize.

There are a few key features that have been alluring organizations toward SharePoint Online, thus helping them embark on a new digital transformation journey.

• Modern Experience: SharePoint’s modern user interface (UI) has been designed from the ground up, ensuring it is mobile-device friendly. The online version has also addressed quite a few UI usability issues that existed in the classic On-Premises version, such as challenges with navigation, bulk editing and file sharing.
• Integration with Other Office 365 Products: Microsoft Power Automate helps integrate SharePoint with other products such as Exchange, Teams, Groups and OneDrive. This also allows organizations to share and collaborate internally with colleagues, as well as with partners and customers.
• Modern Site Templates: New Team site templates facilitate internal team conversations, document sharing, task/project management and more, while Communication site templates are designed to help broadcast relevant content (on projects, events, latest news, etc.) to employees. Hub sites connect to various site collections and receive data as shared themes, navigation and news roll-ups.
• Modern Search: Out-of-the-box Search web parts in SharePoint Online are AI-enabled, offering results with greater relevance than those offered by classis web parts.
• Customization: SharePoint Framework (SPFx) delivers the platform required to develop custom solutions/web parts using a JavaScript framework such as Angular, React, Knockout and many other open-source tools.
• Integration with Other Platforms: Teams can leverage a wide range of standard connectors available under the Microsoft Power Platform (MPP) or build their own connectors to streamline data integration.

Challenges Organizations face during Migration

Few enterprises are still skeptical about making the move to SharePoint Online and there could be hurdles during the migration journey too.

• Regulations: Regulations could come in the way of moving certain kinds of workloads to the Cloud.
• Fear of Disruption: Some organizations may be cautious due to heavy customizations and the fear of disrupting applications in the legacy SharePoint environment.
• Workflows Migration: Certain third-party tools are unable to migrate running workflows or pending tasks, and in such cases, all workflows need to be closed.
• Email-enabled Libraries: Instances where emails may be triggered will need to be mitigated by disabling those instances.
• Branding Files Residing in File System: There could be legacy applications developed over a decade ago, with a large portion of images, CSS and JS files residing in multiple hive folders due to the file system of the server. During migration over to the Cloud, these files will need to be manually moved to SharePoint lists and script to replace the relative references that were executed on staging.

Why migration is the go-to way?

SharePoint Online, which is the cloud-based version of the Microsoft SharePoint product, offers multiple benefits such as the following:

• No on-premise infrastructure licensing and support costs
• Modernized and responsive UX
• Implemented as per latest technology/features
• Zero-downtime deployment
• Improvement in site rendering performance
• Better productivity
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Office
• Customizable UI

The Way Forward

SharePoint Online is getting more powerful, yet friendlier with every new update and release. Its lean Cloud-based infrastructure and cost effectiveness has been making the migration toward SharePoint Online a desirable activity. Every business has unique objectives to achieve, and these objectives will play an important role in making a choice between the On-Premises server and SharePoint Online.

The migration to SharePoint Online is a significant task, bringing in transformation in the way enterprises collaborate. Hence, it is not only important to choose the right migration tool but also the right partner to derive benefits from the transformation.
Read more about the process in detail in our whitepaper here

About the Author

Prasanta Barik is a Senior Architect at Happiest Minds with over 12 years of experience in designing and developing software solutions on Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint, Modern Workplace, Azure, Power Platform, and AI. He also possesses extensive experience in the consulting and pre-sales areas.

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Customer-facing marketing material usually apprises a prospect about a company’s products or services and their benefits. Persuasive content can lead to conversion while feeble content can steer a prospect toward competitors. This makes marketing collaterals important elements of an organization’s success. Key parameters for evaluating the maturity of customer-facing content are:

• Understand the target audience – Specificity in language is achieved by keeping the ideal buyer in mind. For example, “From Brand A’s Honeydew collection, this shopping cart helps children advance their social skills through inventive play.” is a description of a toy shopping cart and is focused on children.
• What’s in it for me? It is important to focus on the performance aspect of products or services, highlighting benefits. For example, “This Thermal Razor by Brand B provides heat instantly at the push of a button, giving you a comfortable shave.” is a description of a razor. It clearly explains how the razor enables a comfortable shave.
• Back your words – Assertions should always be backed by evidence. This will also help stay away from legal hassles. For example, a mobile device provider’s website reads: “This device looks spectacular and comes in two of the most loved color variants: gold and black. Brand C always focuses on product quality and delivers the best after-sales service.” Though the website assures the “best” after-sales service, there’s no concrete proof supporting the claim, and such statements should be avoided.
• Use words that stimulate the senses – Enticing the senses by using the right adverbs and adjectives in marketing content often results in purchases. For example, the description “Choose from our frozen desserts featuring rich ganache, velvety caramel, luscious praline, refreshing fruit, and crunchy nuts.” makes use of multiple words to elevate the content. However, that doesn’t mean content should be saturated with adjectives and adverbs just to paint a colorful picture of the company’s products.

NLP-driven qualitative assessment can help organizations across verticals and horizontals comprehend the quality of their sales and marketing content published across various platforms. The output of the analysis can be used to offer valuable feedback to content writers and marketing professionals, who in turn can help enhance content quality and overall sales of the organization.

User-facing marketing content can be made customer-centric by targeting a set of people who are potential buyers of the product. For example, the sentence “Since ages, Indian mothers have been realizing that Brand C Drink helps choosy toddlers get the required nutrition to grow taller and gain weight.” has been used to attract parents and children. Another example would be: “Our fully breathable mattress with feather-soft material keeps parents happy and children comfortable.” to attract parents.

The words “mothers”, “toddlers”, “parents” and “children” are common nouns and represent groups of people. “Mothers” is used as the subject of the sentence. The algorithm to identify customer-centricity should be aimed at determining these unique features.

User-facing content such as marketing content in product descriptions, brochures, flyers and websites apprises prospects about the organization’s products, services and their benefits. A compelling, customer-centric copy with an appropriate focus on: benefits, solid claims or assertions backed with proof, and words that stimulate the senses can result in increased conversions. At the same time, content that doesn’t include any of these essential features can shift the prospects’ attention toward competitors.

Marketing professionals, creative copywriters and sales executives can leverage the automated mechanism detailed in this whitepaper to assess the quality of their marketing content by scoring the usage of personal, sensorial, functional and superlative words and phrases in their material. The method proves that lexical, syntactic and contextual NLP techniques can help improve sales by enhancing the quality of content.

To know more read our whitepaper here

About the author:

Siddharth is a Lead Data Scientist at Happiest Minds. His role primarily involves solving problems in the NLP, Optical Character Reader (OCR) and Chatbot areas. He is also responsible for helping customers address challenges in the Data Analytics area. His love for his job is driven by his interest in writing code and playing with data structures, and he likes to share his knowledge with the wider community. Siddharth has worked across multiple domains such as Digital Marketing, Edu-tech and Construction.

The post How to create content that clicks and converts using NLP-Driven Qualitative Assessment appeared first on Silicon Mirror.

Today, “multi-cloud environment” is not a new terminology for enterprises. When an organization takes the initiative to adopt infrastructure and services from different cloud vendors, we say that it is leveraging a multi-cloud environment. There are extremely convincing reasons that multi-cloud is providing huge agility and cost efficiency to enterprises with its flexibility to separate different workloads into different environments depending on their specific requirements.

As companies continue to progressively deploy services from multiple providers, business benefits such as increased agility, improved disaster recovery, faster time to market, cost optimization, improved power to negotiate, lower dependency on a single vendor, and product innovation are expected to increase. However, along with these advantages, the multi-cloud journey does introduce a few natural challenges such as difficulty in managing costs, reduced performance (in some instances), increased security risks, difficulty in controlling operation overheads, and management.

Working with leading enterprise customers and cloud vendors, we have identified key pain points, related best practices, and tools and frameworks that can help enterprises to begin or evaluate their multi-cloud journey.

In a similar tone, Gartner says by 2022, 80% of companies leveraging the cloud, will have a multi-cloud approach. Avoiding a multi-cloud approach makes organizations fully dependent on one cloud service provider (CSP) for all their cloud-related services, and in such instances, there is a possibility that a few of the services may not offer the best value or service to address a specific situation. In most cases, either too much or too little is done to fit into the exact requirements of the user. As an example, if an organization is looking at using Azure Function for all client-facing event handling, and then, aims at taking the event data to a robust analytics platform for finding better insights out of the event logs, Azure might not be the best choice. It would be ideal to drain the data to GCP to get the task completed.

Below are a few key reasons that depict why adoption of multi-cloud architecture is becoming a mandate for progressive organizations:

• Choice of Service: No single cloud vendor provides the best set of services for all of an organization’s needs. However, a multi-cloud environment allows enterprises to choose the best service from multiple vendors for specific requirements. For example, MS Azure might be the ideal choice for fully managed (PaaS) runtimes while GCP or IBM Cloud could be the preferred choice for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services.
• Reduced Vendor Lock-in: A multi-cloud environment empowers organizations to choose services from multiple vendors which eventually help them not only to distribute workloads across multiple providers but also to reduce vendor-specific dependency. Organizations have the necessary controls if they want to migrate to a different provider—when the quality of services degrades, prices go up, etc.
• Low Latency: Latency plays a crucial role while making a decision involving cloud adoption. Choosing a service and infrastructure near to users can lead to better performance due to minimum server hops. When an organization plans for multi-region deployment of an application to provide a uniform and seamless customer experience, a multi-cloud strategy empowers them to choose the closest services and infra from multiple providers.
• Increased Disaster Recovery: Multi-cloud environments help organizations to better manage their disaster recovery by adding the flexibility to choose redundant servers from different cloud providers. A multi-cloud arrangement allows replicas of applications in two or more clouds. In case of downtime in one cloud, all relevant requests can be redirected to the applications hosted in the other cloud. This arrangement can also be extended to multiple regions to achieve greater resiliency.

Happiest Minds guidelines for a smooth journey toward multi-cloud adoption

The industry is definitely treading on the multi-cloud path. Working with enterprise clients and leading cloud vendors, we at Happiest Minds have identified the best practices that help organizations successfully navigate their multi-cloud transformations. Here, we have been rapidly building our capabilities and best practices to not only help our clients map out their strategies for the cloud, but also to help them manage, monitor and secure their applications and data once they are in these highly distributed multi-cloud ecosystems. Here are the three key pillars for multi-cloud adoption:

Building the Right Strategy: Building a right and actionable strategy is a key success factor for multi-cloud adoption. Organizations should prepare for the migration with realistic goals, selecting the right cloud partners, deciding the best-fit tools, choosing the right set of people and competencies to assist with the migration, and strengthening the structure to help manage performance, cost and security. Selecting a suitable multi-cloud management platform/partner can bring resources under a single umbrella while implementing the correct compliance, security, and sue diligence.

Build/Deployment/Migration Approach: When an organization plans to build a new capability, or, migrate or re-engineer existing capabilities, by leveraging best practices, organisations need to streamline the process, delivering faster results and predictable outcomes while managing cost and and analyze cost vs performance while distributing workloads across various clouds. The organizations also need to analyze reliability vs performance and apply the correct strategy for automation of various tasks that reduce human effort and error, allowing you to stay agile.

Visibility and Measurement: The level of visibility plays an important role in deciding the success or failure of a multi-cloud adoption initiative. Cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), and Microservice-based applications act as the backbone of any business, and requires careful evaluation and performance monitoring of every deployed service on a regular basis—to streamline multi-cloud operations and deliver uninterrupted and superior digital experiences and choose the best cloud monitoring tool.

To know more read our whitepaper here

About the author:

Ramkrishna Chatterjee is a Senior Architect in Happiest Minds having 16 years of experience in Enterprise Architecture, Cloud, Digital Transformation, Multitenant SaaS Platform Development, Microservices , API, Hybrid Integration, SOA, Design Thinking, Technology Maturity, Technology Future Proofing and Architecture Governance activities for large enterprise scale initiatives

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