Making Sense of Public Cloud Investments

The public cloud infrastructure services (Iaas) market, according to Gartner's estimation is reaching $60 billion in 2019 and is growing at 27% YoY (fastest growing cloud services segment) from the previous year. Assuming Asia contributes 25% of the global share, turns the region into a critical geo for cloud vendors to battle for market leadership. 

However, cloud practitioners in Asia are still somewhat battling with what is considered as decade old cloud myths evolving around security, compliance, IT control and short term ROIs when conversing with regional customers riding on conventional structures and work cultures. This includes financial institutions, communication service providers, retailers, manufacturers and other asset intensive industries.

While these are all valid concerns, over the years premium cloud vendors have more than proven that their infrastructure and platform services (IaaS, PaaS) are superior to any single institutional  environment in terms of performance, security, reliability and overall economics to sustain just about any type of workloads. The public cloud values are now evolving rapidly with introduction of newer, advanced services in opensource databases, artificial intelligence, low code coding, and running mission critical workloads, enabling businesses to gain better control of operations as they cut waste, optimise performance, develop the much needed new capabilities and differentiators faster than ever. 

Open-source Database Services

Businesses have been dabbling with open-source databases (as well as open-source operating systems, libraries and tools) even before cloud computing services emerged and was aware of the potential to free organisations from growing commercial database licensing burdens. However, managing these open-source databases required additional training, operational and maintenance resources, apart from the unpredictable fixes and releases from the open source community. These issues limited the usage of open-source databases such as PosgreSQL to a small number of non critical, in-house development projects and applications in the past. 

This scenario changed in the recent years as cloud computing companies started to offer fully managed open-source database services such as PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL and many others. Businesses start to increase adoption overnight by consuming cloud based open-source database services for existing and new applications while gaining new efficiencies, never possible before. The polyglot nature of cloud native development, where multiple types of databases and models are deployed in an application composed of micro-services and API calls only drives this trend further. 

Popularity of open-source databases according to DB Engine Ranking site, is about to converge with commercial databases in 2019 or in the early parts 2020. 

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Explore pre-trained ML models

If new to artificial intelligence and its sub domains machine learning, deep learning and transfer learning, take advantage of the various pre-trained models offered by public cloud vendors such as Google, AWS and Microsoft to perform prediction, classifications, natural language processing (NLP), speech processing, computer vision (video, image and object recognition), decision support and planning tasks. 

Start by experimenting solutions to business problems while inflating returns on organisational data assets. This provides an opportunity for the business to quickly reap benefits from readily available models where the team need only prepare data, select features and train the model for required tasks (e.g predictions, classifications).  Trained models can then be deployed with other production applications and systems through APIs to apply learnings on new data samples.

Building custom models..

As the internal team gain experience and get familiarise with ML projects, commence a process to create step-by-step AI playbook to define and prioritise business problems that can be addressed with AI, data preparation, algorithms selection, and developing a model to make predictions. This exercise should involve critical members from business, data science and the engineering teams, ideally aligned to addressing growth challenges, resources optimisation, innovation and enhancing customer experience. 

Machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow, Pytorch, MXNET, Keras, Caffe, Scikit, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit and Theano, that comes readily packaged with interface, libraries, tools, pre-built and optimised components facilitates fast development of AI models without getting into the details of underlying algorithms and complex architectures. 

Pick a cloud vendor for ML-as-a-service that best fit your needs...

Top public cloud vendors such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba and Google provide support to most of the frameworks mentioned above for custom building models apart from their pre trained model offers for common business problems. New developers can benefit from starting with frameworks such as Keras and delve deeper into Tensorflow or other suitable frameworks as they get accustomed with the building blocks and programming languages.

Develop cloud native applications faster ...

Today a challenge sparks an idea, an idea turns into a prototype and a prototype transforms into a multi-platform first release in just matter of days and weeks. Aside from core infrastructure services, cloud vendors offer various advanced services ranging from devop, language SDKs, container orchestration, serverless computing, no to low code development platforms (both proprietary and open-source), APIs, code libraries to ready templates to help organisations accelerate application development arising from sudden business needs. 

Most post cloud applications are series of micro-services connected to one another via APIs leveraging languages, databases and code bases most suitable for the required function and the supporting technical environment.

No to Low Code Platforms

In addition, low code platforms such as Mendix, Outsystems, Google App Maker, Appian, and Microsoft Power App empowers traditional developers, IT professionals and to a certain degree the average business users to accelerate software delivery for business use cases made up of common features and components by simply utilising existing templates, forms, objects, drag and drop of prebuilt features.

Ensure performance of mission critical applications....

Learn which of your mission critical applications are suffering from intermittent or persistent performance issues affecting business processes critical to productivity, customer experience and revenue activities. Cloud vendors offer various services and pricing plans to optimise business applications from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and others where data grows exponentially with transactions in time.

Exploring public cloud offers for the aforementioned type of applications can reveal credible areas of savings, operational simplification, performance improvement, speedy delivery of new business requirements, higher utilisation, improved security and compliance. Keeping a revisable record of requirements and working with cloud vendors to formulate cloud contracts to efficiently counter all planned and unplanned workloads can free internal resources for myriad of higher impact business activities.

Know values, learn constraints and strategise for long term...

Ultimately cloud values can vary significantly from business to business depending on the nature of operational model and the overall ecosystem. The four areas mentioned here are general enough for most sectors, though some businesses might benefit immensely from other emerging tech such as augmented reality, IOT, 3D or bigdata platform services.

In addition, identifying constraints that prohibit enterprise architectures from extracting full potential of public cloud eliminates aimless unproductive explorations. For instance legacy apps on rigid centralised architectures that may not gain much efficiencies when moved to the cloud.

Finally having a solid long term strategy, helps. For instance all new development and deployment to take the 'Cloud First' approach, or maintaining a hybrid cloud environment with only unpredictable workloads moving to public cloud or 'Cloud Only' approach where the internal teams build in-house brokerage capabilities to fully monitor its environments on multiple public clouds and perform various optimisation as needed.

Will Data Privacy spark the next Wave of Innovative Applications?

Privacy is a top agenda as we live in an era where data is a fundamental requirement to access healthcare, education, financial facilities, commercial services, employment, security, welfare, social networks, media and even exercise voting rights. Everything around us is designed to optimise and improve by harnessing data, that it has become an undeniable asset with unprecedented utility. 

This makes data a prime heist for unethical hackers and modern day criminals who steal, doctor and manipulate it for illicit purposes including financial gain, scams, terrorism, identity theft, spreading fake news or spying. Some notable breaches from 2018 are the Aadhar breach involving a staggering 1.1 billion records, forum site Quora, Googleplus, Facebook, several airlines and other online entities.

This is why many large corporations that gauge petabytes of user data are under heavy scrutiny by privacy enforcers and regulators such as National data protection authorities in the European Union through the much debated GDPR guideline. For instance a recent announcement by one of Alphabets subsidiary, Sidewalk Lab on a plan to package and sell cellphone data for various service enhancement sparked outrage from various ethics observer and human rights groups, even when the company justified that the unique identifiers will be removed from the dataset.

Staying connected at all time and living somewhat transparently, is the future reality...

But harnessing data is an unavoidable exercise when it comes to achieving greater quality of life, good decisions and optimal utilisation of natural resources.  As such, refraining from the internet, social networks, online media and performing digital transactions will only result in disadvantages, inconvenience and missed values from economic, social and safety standpoints.

Even if we successfully retained a mysterious existence, we will not be free from unwarranted surveillance by both businesses, independent institutions and governments in public places for various reasons as cities, buildings and public amenities become embedded with sensors, camera feeds and chips that connects to the Internet or clouds to perpetually collect data and create values.

Privacy in Asia....

Asia witnessed multiple incidents of data breach last year among CSPs, healthcare providers, financial service providers and even government sources that lead the public to question credibility of domestic institutions in protecting personal, usage and behavioural data. According to a report by Gemalto, Asia Pacific region contributed to over 35% of cybersecurity incidents last year. 

In most cases, institutions took no further action to restore user confidence apart from the breach announcement, which is a mandatory compliance requirement. Gemalto further stated that the numbers could have been much higher in reality, due to unreported incidents especially in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an exception to this as the authorities take great pride in concluding data breach cases successfully to safeguard the regional digital economy.

Asia also suffers from an overall weaker legal framework and laws for privacy though dedicated privacy task force is emerging in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Philippines, out of which Singapore perhaps is the most advanced in ratifying and enforcing the aforesaid laws. 

At the same time, there is a rise in governments that are explicitly developing and extending state surveillance under the pretext of national agenda, security and cyber crime laws for political reasons. Technologies such as facial recognition, artificial intelligence, biometric, advanced identity card systems, ever increasing compute capacities and various citizen facing applications are converging into social scoring systems that provides granular monitoring of individuals, regardless of their consent. 

But there is a new way to tackle privacy - a new form of application architecture is on the rise .....

Apart from comprehensive legal framework, enforcements and the use of advance security architectures, strategies and tools, the application design and architecture itself can serve as a mechanism to protect privacy by separating personal data and identities from applications.

For instance, a project led by Led by Tim Berners-Lee called 'Solid' and is currently run from MIT, consist a set of tools and conventions that helps to preserve integrity of identities, privacy and data ownership while enabling developers and businesses create a new wave of innovative web applications. Solid is a web decentralisation project that aims to put rightful ownership of data back to every users and empower applications that are completely decentralised. 

Currently the use cases are limited for developer community alone, though discussions on Solid servers and tools are beginning to emerge in Quora, Reddit, FB Groups and GitHub.

Similarly Digi.me and HAT are all projects aiming to decentralised applications on the web, where users can create libraries of their data and is completely in control of how the data is used by corporations and governments.

Privacy concerns will lead to new opportunities ....

Most large businesses perceive privacy as a critical challenge to overcome with growing pressure from regulators. Though regulators approach are not helping as solutions developed around privacy laws are difficult and expensive to attain technically, especially for Internet giants.

In the end, solution might just emerge from the tech world itself through new architectures and business models lead by smart startups willing to embark on new frontiers such as Solid, Digi.me and HAT to develop fully decentralised applications that satisfy users, businesses and regulators.

Larger companies might use 'business within business' approach to innovate in the privacy space or quickly get onto the new themes through acquisitions, mergers and rethinking business models. On the another note, decentralised web may lead to even larger paradigm shift, similar to the ones we experienced when organisations moved from on-premise to cloud of everything, creating new digital eco-systems altogether. The one thing that no one can afford to do, is to remain unchanged.

Let's Kopi IP Series – Featuring Codename.biz by Trytec Malaysia

Paper based Business Cards are now Officially Obsolete

Most successful business professionals are fervent networkers and constantly keep an eye out for new talents, potential customers, partnerships, investors and other useful contacts that can be cleverly leveraged to achieve growth objectives. In a fast moving business, executives routinely fill work calendars with professional events, calls and business meetings where new connections are initiated, usually through exchange of paper based business cards, that may be followed by LinkedIn invitations.

However managing and maintaining large number of contacts using this method over time can turn counter productive as executives move organisations, change career path, get promoted, shift to a different region or simply relocate to a new office.

The use of online tools in creating modern professional branding..

Paper based business cards are unable to capture and link to online profiles nor can the contact details presented, altered without reprinting.  Even when business cards are digitised by card scanners, such systems do not necessarily prompt an automatic connect to online profiles owned by card holders. The card formats vary and are not always an exact match for the mobile contact list, resulting in missing information during information capturing process. When there is a change in address, mobile number, email, company or new links such as blog or video is added, the paper based card has to be reprinted and redistributed to keep the network updated.

Codename.biz is a Virtual Business Card Platform 

Online networking, collaboration and content sharing platforms such as LinkedIn, Workspace, Reddit, Twitter, Quora, blogs, online professional groups and YouTube are changing the way professional profiles are composed and orchestrated. The new age workforce actively utilises multiple online avenues to creatively add personification, demonstrate leadership, command specialisation and keep

professional branding relevant with current market, industry and business trends.

Codename.biz by Trytec addresses this challenge and simplifies the process of creating, sharing and updating virtual calling cards that includes additional online branding assets to various business networks simultaneously in realtime. Users can use a single cloud interface to create business contact information with links to social media profiles, websites, blogs, videos and other multimedia content that describes the business and expertise best.

The virtual business card is available in different colours and designs, easily shared via mobile, email or other messaging tools such as WhatsApp or Messenger.

QR codes are generated for users to facilitate connections by simply scanning the code using the mobile camera. Trytec is currently expanding on this idea and considering options to print the QR codes in the form of costume jewelries and watches to promote usability and convenience.

It’s only a matter of time before the traditional calling cards are abandoned…

Traditional calling cards are becoming less relevant as we move into a highly connected work environment where the lines of professional, social and personal lives are beginning to assimilate. Systems and algorithms are amassing data continuously on netizens to generate various types of scores on social, commercial and professional contributions. Making a novel online presence and an original personal branding, a crucial prerequisite for attracting business opportunities.

The simplicity of Codename.biz can turn it into the next de-facto method for presenting contact information and identity to business networks. It offers a compelling value to users by binding all critical professional branding assets in one place with features to add or edit sources in real time without complicating the virtual profile with a resume style outline.

Be an early adopter, try the beta NOW

Codename.biz is currently in beta run as work to lift user experience and robustness of the platform are carried out behind the scene with more user feedbacks becoming available. In the mean time, users are encouraged to take advantage of the free service period to try out the service.

Application Interoperability in Multi-Cloud

Some business problems, never gets old. Interoperability among systems or application is one such issue that requires varying degree of treatment depending on the type of organisation and business stage. This article penned by Let's Kopi is most suitable for startups and SMBs.

A hybrid technology environment is inevitable for any business

Organisations depend on business applications to empower various capabilities to optimise operations, generate growth, enhance customer experience, and accelerate innovation. A typical enterprise technology architecture today delivers these

capabilities by cleverly balancing in-house solutions with a number of Saas services (e.g. Salesforce, Service Now, Box, etc). Though, most post millennial startups are built on cloud-first strategy, which means an internal datacenter does not emerge until business matures with a satisfactory level of solution adoption and customer base.

Business processes transcend cloud and non-cloud applications 

In either scenario, businesses ends up with an enterprise technology environment that spreads across the in-house datacenter, hosted datacenters and various public clouds. Stringent industry compliance, data security, privacy, and call for other regulatory requirements will continue to push at least some parts of the business systems to on-premise deployment. This means critical business processes will continue to transcend several applications to invoke one another in completing workflows, share data, exchange messages, and push results to performance dashboards across a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

Building integration between applications is necessary….
Linking and integrating applications residing in cloud and non-cloud environment is a common undertaking for businesses that depends on automated processes, mobility, data, and insightful predictions for superior performance, productivity, and production. For instance, a business may integrate a Saas CRM with on premise sales systems to trigger ‘billing’ and ‘delivery’ request when an order is received. A CSP may connect a cloud based customer loyalty mobile application with on-premise ERP and CRM to make offers and process purchases in realtime.

Plenty of tools and methods to isolate integration between applications

There are literally hundreds of tools and services to link on-premise applications with SaaS services to connect processes, orchestrate end to end workflow, ensure data synchronisation, promote data consistency, standardise business rules, enforce security policies, and achieve a seamless business façade (in terms of UI) for users.

Most SaaS service providers offer a range of APIs and even offer PaaS services to extend their SaaS offerings (e.g. Salesforce, Service Now). Pure play integration vendors focus on solutions such as SOA middleware, ESB, EAI and other GUI based tools which enables developers to create interfaces and APIs to suit respective business need and use case.

For instance elastic.io, WSO2 and Cloud Elements are pretty decent option for SMB and smaller companies (based on product and price) looking to isolate integration layers that connect the various technology environment owned by the organisation. While companies such as Mulesoft, Infomatica and Snaplogic may carry a much mature and extensive range of offerings, suited for larger organisation with much complex IT environment.

What approach and which solution?

Ultimately, developers can choose between performing a point to point integration or establishing a middleware integration layer that promotes fluid linkages between systems without changes or minimal impact to source applications. The later being the best practise of the majority. The selection of methods and tools however depends on three critical factors as stated below:

1. The use case – what the business intend to achieve with the integration? For instance data consistency, data exchange, message exchange, end to end workflow or a common UI to access all business app.

2. Requirements – the relevant systems may run on different operating systems, databases, libraries, and written in different languages. The selected tools must be able to support and mediate these environments.

3. IT realestate – how big is your environment? How many business applications? Where they reside? In a very small setup, point to point integration may prove to be fast and economical solution. A rapidly growing environment on the contrary, can benefit from a middleware integration layer.

Sizing up the above can help determine the level of complexities and resources, when it comes to integrating requirements in hybrid environments, switching Saas providers, and ensuring business compliance.

Recommendations - don't overpower integration requirements

There is no single silver bullet for enterprise application integration challenges especially in our current state where public clouds are gauging more of our datacenter and on-premise systems. Selection of tools rely heavily on the specifics of the use case, requirements, dependencies, existing IT landscape and even business strategies to avoid vendor lock-in.

Nevertheless, good decisions can be made by zooming into the problem in hand with a bit of foresight. For example if connecting two applications, then making use of available APIs will be sufficient without the need of any high end integration middleware. But if the this scenario continues to involve other systems and applications, then an integration middleware or tool becomes mandatory. In intermediate situations, the business can also custom build integration interface on-premise or on a PaaS platform provided by cloud vendors.

A final reminder is that to meet integration requirements sufficiently without the need to overpower the integration layer for tasks that has not emerged in the integration roadmap, just yet. A common mistake many small companies make, is to purchase tools that are sold as future proof and broader in application at higher premium. These tools end up under utilised while businesses continue to pay a premium year after year. Tools change radically as new technologies enter our environment and should only be selected based on known business requirements.