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Top 7 Reasons Why your Business Needs Open-Source

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Adopting open-source solutions can provide numerous advantages for businesses of all sizes. Here are the top seven reasons why your business should consider leveraging open-source technologies:

Cost Savings

  • No Licensing Fees: Open-source software is typically free to use, which can significantly reduce software licensing costs. This allows businesses to allocate resources to other critical areas.

Flexibility and Customization

  • Tailored Solutions: Open-source software can be modified to meet specific business needs. This flexibility enables organizations to customize applications to suit their unique workflows and processes.

Community Support and Collaboration

  • Vibrant Communities: Open-source projects often have active communities that provide support, documentation, and shared knowledge. This collaborative environment fosters innovation and allows users to benefit from collective expertise.

Enhanced Security

  • Transparency: With open-source software, the source code is publicly available, allowing for peer review and scrutiny. This transparency can lead to quicker identification and resolution of security vulnerabilities compared to proprietary software.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

  • Interoperability: Open-source solutions often promote interoperability, reducing dependency on a single vendor. This allows businesses to switch providers or integrate various technologies without significant barriers.

Rapid Innovation

  • Continuous Development: Open-source projects benefit from contributions from developers around the world, leading to faster updates, new features, and enhancements. This can help businesses stay competitive with the latest technologies.

Skill Development and Talent Acquisition

  • Fostering Expertise: Using open-source technologies can help organizations build a skilled workforce familiar with widely-used platforms and tools. This expertise can enhance internal capabilities and attract talent interested in working with innovative technologies.

Conclusion

Integrating open-source solutions into your business strategy can lead to significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and enhanced security. By leveraging the power of community-driven development and avoiding vendor lock-in, businesses can remain agile and innovative in a rapidly changing technological landscape. As open-source software continues to gain traction, embracing it can position your organization for long-term success.

For more on Open-Source Solutions, Contact SNP here.

Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud: Which One is Right for You?

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Shortly after an organization makes the decision to migrate to the cloud, another big decision must be made: Which cloud model should the business adopt? The public cloud model and private model each have benefits and drawbacks, and several factors must first be weighed before the right decision can be determined.

At SNP Technologies, we take a highly-structured approach to cloud design and development, and our implementation services take into consideration our clients’ current and future business needs before recommending a specific cloud model.

Following is a brief explanation highlighting the differences between public and private cloud offerings as well as some of the key factors we take into consideration before making a recommendation:

Public clouds are hosted services made available over the internet. Organizations that use web servers or application systems where security and compliance requirements are not very rigid normally prefer to use public clouds. For instance, web-based email, data storage, or file transfers over the internet (e.g. FTP), online office applications, and web hosting often use a public cloud.

Key resources (e.g., servers, storage) are shared between multiple users, and the infrastructure, services, and usage policies are often times managed by a cloud service provider.

 

Some of the key advantages of a public cloud offering include:

  • Simple and easy to deploy: Public clouds are easily available as a service over the internet.
  • Low initial investment costs: Shared key resources (e.g. servers, storage) enable lower start-up costs, which makes public clouds most appealing to start-ups and small businesses.
  • Efficient: IT resources and services are made available immediately, saving time for the company.
  • Zero maintenance: Hardware and network infrastructure is maintained by the cloud service provider.
  • No contracts: Public clouds typically use a pay-as-you-go pricing model, also known as a utility model.

 

Some of the disadvantages of a public cloud offering include:

  • Lack of control: Clients have zero control over the data infrastructure, which can raise concerns about data privacy and integrity.
  • Performance: The network performance depends on the public cloud provider’s internet connectivity, which is largely outside the customer’s control.
  • Security concerns:  With hardware resource being shared among multiple users, IT security issues and data theft concerns arise.

Private Clouds, which are also known as enterprise clouds, are for organizations that have high security, compliance, and data privacy requirements. Many mission-critical business applications have specific performance, security, and compliance needs, that can only be met by a customized private cloud, which gives you a managed, dedicated, secure and scalable environment. A private cloud needs to be looked at as a long-term investment, which involves a careful selection of the right technology and architecture to ensure optimal performance over a specific period.

 

Some of the key advantages of a private cloud include:

  • Control: Web-based controls allow users to monitor and track system usage and give them a complete view of their IT infrastructure.
  • Security & Compliance: Each cloud environment belongs to a single client, which allows for more granular security controls as well as alignment with organizational and industry data governance policies.
  • Reliability: Private cloud offerings enable end-to-end managed services capabilities and can meet stricter SLA requirements. Additionally, complementary services such as backup and disaster recovery and granular data retention requirements are oftentimes included.
  • Affordable: With the flexibility of private clouds, new workloads can be deployed without incurring extra capital expenses in physical infrastructure.
  • Superior Performance: Normally, private clouds are deployed inside the firewall of the organization’s intranet which ensures efficiency and strong network performance.
  • Easy Customization: Private cloud hardware and other resources can be easily customized.

 

Some potential drawbacks of private cloud offerings include:

  • Higher Costs: Building an on-premise private cloud data center isn’t cheap. In addition to the initial IT and hardware costs, companies must factor personnel costs and periodic upgrade costs. In the case of outsourced private cloud, operating costs will include per-resource usage and are subject to change at the discretion of the service provider.
  • Underutilization: Unlike public clouds where resources are turned on and paid for as needed, private cloud requires companies to purchase resources ahead of time and to predict future needs, which can lead to underutilization.
  • Capacity Ceiling: Due to a service provider’s limitations, users could run up against a capacity ceiling regarding how many servers or storage resources the provider can handle.
  • Vendor lock-in: This can be a major impediment to private cloud adoption, especially when the hardware and infrastructure is outsourced. This is a service delivery technique where the client company is forced to continue with the same service provider, thus preventing the client from migrating to another vendor.

However, by using a Hybrid approach, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud, keeping the public cloud optional. For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud.  This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts etc

For more information about which cloud computing model suits your business best, Contact SNP Technologies here.

Top 5 Azure Cognitive Services for your Applications

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Microsoft’s cloud-based platform Azure has helped many businesses expand while reducing costs associated with hosting and storing data and applications in the cloud. SNP Technologies leverages AI-based cognitive services to add intelligence, automation and search capabilities to your applications. And by adding easy to use APIs (application program interfaces), machine learning algorithms and real-time computing, SNP can help you build powerful intelligence within your applications to trigger natural and contextual interactions with features like facial recognition, speech recognition, emotion detection, and speech and language understanding.

Here are the top five most popular Azure cognitive services and how they help your business grow:

 

Vision

This is a Microsoft Cognitive Service to build custom image classifiers. Custom Vision makes it easier and faster to build, deploy and improve image classifiers with artificial intelligence and machine learning. This service features facial analysis, handwriting recognition, optical character recognition (OCR) from images and real-time video analyses.

Speech

Through Azure’s speech cognitive services API, you can integrate speech processing capabilities into any app or service. So, regardless of speech style, geography or technical term, the application allows users to recognize everything that’s spoken and transcribe the text accordingly.

Language

Language and context-based meaning are two of the most important features that define communication. Through the cognitive services language API, you can develop apps that understand a wide variety of text.

Knowledge

Azure’s cognitive services offer some of the most comprehensive and accurate database creation and search tools available. The knowledge API can leverage or create resources to be integrated into apps and services with several other capabilities. For instance, a Q&A service can be used to scan vast amounts of content and text and quickly extract the most relevant information. So, no matter the question, you’re bound to find the answers you’re seeking.

Search

Search helps users find what they need while searching through billions of web pages, videos, news search, and images. Leveraging Bing, cognitive services employ powerful AI-powered algorithms capable of searching, comparing results, and summoning only those that are relevant to your inquiry.

Microsoft Azure has a wide range of intelligent AI-powered services, each designed to accommodate various needs. Through this, you can create systems that can see, hear, speak and understand people in their own natural language and use the same communication method to relate to them.

Interested in incorporating Azure Cognitive Services into your next app? Let us assist you! Contact SNP here.

Microsoft Cognitive Services

Key Differences between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery & Continuous Deployment

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Over the past few years, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery have become a part of our daily technology vocabulary. As we continue to implement these practices into our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) workflows, these three terminologies can be confusing.

In this post, we will define each of these processes and how they work together so that stakeholders, developers and project managers can work in alignment in one integrated environment.

Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Deployment (CD) are essential practices in modern software development that enhance collaboration, speed, and quality. Here’s a breakdown of the key differences between them:

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is the process of automating the build and testing of code every time a team member commits changes to version control. CI encourages developers to share their code and unit tests by merging their changes into a shared version control repository after every small task completion. Committing code triggers an automated build system to grab the latest code from the shared repository and to build, test, and validate the full master branch. In the continuous integration process, most of the work is done by an automated test technique, which requires a unit test framework. It is a best practice to have a build server designed specifically for performing these tests, so your development team can continue merging requests even while tests are being performed. Implementing Continuous Integration is a best practice that enhances the development workflow, improves code quality, and accelerates the overall software delivery process. By automating the build and testing phases, development teams can focus more on writing code and less on integration issues, ultimately leading to a more efficient and collaborative environment.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice that ensures code changes are automatically prepared for release to production. It involves delivering every change to a production-like environment, where rigorous automated testing validates that applications and services function as expected. Continuous Delivery is a vital practice in modern software development that streamlines the deployment process while ensuring high quality. By automating the delivery pipeline and conducting thorough testing, organizations can achieve a state of readiness for production at any time, empowering them to respond swiftly to business needs and market demands. This practice not only enhances efficiency but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration within development teams.

Continuous Deployment

Every change that passes the automated tests is deployed to production automatically. Continuous deployment relies on small changes, which are constantly tested, deployed, and released to production immediately upon verification. The ownership of the code from development to release must be controlled by the developer and must be free-flowing. The automation of steps allows this process to be implemented and executed without cumbersome workflows. Post-deployment, logs must be inspected to validate whether any key metrics are affected—positively or negatively. Continuous deployment should be the goal of most companies that are not constrained by regulatory or other requirements.

Understanding these key differences is crucial for teams looking to implement effective DevOps practices. While CI focuses on integrating code and running tests, CD ensures that the software is always ready for deployment, and Continuous Deployment automates the release process. Together, these practices enable teams to deliver high-quality software quickly and efficiently.

How they work together

When you’re ready for deployment, you need to have your automation in place. Automate your continuous integration build server and continuous delivery to staging, which gives you the ability to automatically deploy to production. This means you will automate the entire process from start to finish.

 

 

For more information about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment, Contact SNP Technologies Here

 

Cortana Intelligence for Advanced Analytics

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The Cortana Analytics Suite is fully-managed big data and advanced analytics offering that transforms data into intelligent action. As an end-to-end cloud platform framework, Cortana Analytics Suite includes an integrated, comprehensive set of analytics tools, services, and preconfigured solutions. The key benefits are secure, scalable, fast and flexible roll out of big data analytics projects, reducing time to market and project costs over do-it-yourself approaches.

The Cortana Analytics Suite integrates with Cortana, Microsoft’s digital personal assistant. Analytics services and predictive models can be combined with Cortana capabilities and can be merged into different user interfaces across desktop, web or mobile apps. Essentially, users can interact with these intelligent apps using natural speech. Even better, smart app users can be notified by Cortana if the analytics model finds a new anomaly or insight requiring immediate attention.

Data and Cortana Intelligence:

While data is pervasive, actionable intelligence is typically elusive. The beauty of analytics is in transforming data into actionable information and refining business processes. To do this in a big data world, you need to quickly analyze vast amounts of data from different sources. Having this capability enables organizations to culturally shift from a historical “what” mindset to understanding “why” certain events are happening.

Why your business needs Cortana Intelligence?

1. Manage Information – Connect, prepare, and monitor information at scale with data from websites, apps, and devices.

2. Big Data -Get a central repository to manage all your structured and unstructured data with unlimited scalability.

3. Machine Learning & Advanced Analytics – Get detailed insights into your data to predict outcomes with  Hadoop advanced analytics and make informed business decisions in real time.

4. Interactive Dashboards & Visualizations – Organize and transform your data into rich visuals and view all your data on a single dashboard.

5. Intelligence – Augment your users’ experience through customized responses and by driving appropriate actions with cognitive APIs.

For more information on the Cortana Intelligence Suite and implementing it for your business, Contact SNP Technologies here.