On October 4, Facebook and its properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, were down for more than five hours due to configuration changes on routers in Facebook’s data centers. A five-hour outage is an eternity in our always-on digital economy, costing the company an estimated $65 million and 4.8% in stock valuation. The high-profile Facebook outage is emblematic of just how digitally intermediated our economy is becoming, and the incident renews C-level focus on preventing similar service failures.

The digital revolution forced every organization to reinvent itself, or at least rethink how it goes about doing business. Most large companies have invested substantial cash in what is generally labelled “digital transformation.” While those investments are projected to top $6.8 trillion by 2023, they’re often made without seeing clear benefits or ROI.

Life for an IT architect in retail would be so much easier if people would just spread their shopping out across the year. Since 1941 American Thanksgiving has been a holiday on the fourth Thursday of November and most American companies and schools take the following day as a holiday too with major retailers offering price reductions on this day to kick start the Christmas shopping season. Since 2005 it has been the busiest shopping day of the year.

The recent surge in internet usage and its corresponding increase in data has triggered a new awareness among business owners. One of the main questions from marketers is how their businesses can benefit from Big Data. As a business owner, you should know that Big Data is indeed one of the most incredible things to happen to the marketing industry. If used right, it can enhance your company’s ability to serve its consumers and increase revenue.

The past two years have been challenging on many fronts for people and businesses alike. As a global community, we have been unable to travel long distances due to various restrictions, but that doesn’t mean we stop reaching for the stars.

Millions of Americans are “unbanked” or “underbanked,” meaning they have no bank account or cannot access their bank’s full range of financial services to build credit and plan for the future. Before the pandemic, the Federal Reserve estimated 22% of adults, or around 60 million people, fell into this category. The pandemic has undoubtedly increased these numbers.

November 2021 is a good month if you’re a Fortune 500 or Global 2000 enterprise. The investments your organization has made in “integration” over the years were necessary as the organization and the IT infrastructure grew, but the Integration Infrastructure (i2) has likely been considered a necessary evil by senior management. That investment can now be leveraged in two important, new ways.

The increasingly frictionless consumer banking experience didn’t happen by accident; it arose from foundational technology and culture shifts within banks toward a more digital mindset. Companies across all industries are faced with the urgent need to transform the way they do business, including financial services, but changes abound with governance, security, and culture.

With the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) applications at the workplace, the debate about the future of work, workers, and the workplace has intensified. The polarised nature of debate ranges from job losses versus new-technology job creation through performance efficiency versus performance effectiveness to liberating humans from drudgery versus being controlled by machines. While several other polarities are evident in this debate, the truth always lies somewhere in between.

Cloud computing is the on demand delivery of IT solutions. Instead of investing capital in buying, owning, and maintaining physical servers and data centers, cloud computing enable the organizations to access the services such as, computing, storages, and databases, whenever required from the desired cloud providers. Now, let us move ahead and have a look at some of the key benefits of cloud computing.

The cloud has changed the world of IT — including IT services. In particular, it has enabled companies to dramatically decrease the amount of infrastructure they manage on-premises — reducing their need to use outside IT services to help them purchase, set up and maintain this infrastructure.

“We need to be an AI-enabled company.” Replace the “AI” with any technology from history and this comment becomes a common refrain across businesses lured by the promises of new technology and fueled by FOMO (a fear of missing out). As enterprise strategists and former CXOs who have lived through many “technology is the solution, now what was the problem?” conversations, we talk extensively about this issue.

Researchers and thought leaders shared 3 predictions for enterprise CIOs and IT leaders that are particularly relevant and important to consider as we move into 2022.

In the last 2 installments (Part 1 & Part 2), we discussed the basics of IoT and an example of how the components can be connected and used to provide basic automation and alerting. These seemingly simple steps can build up to provide very advanced controls of all aspects of the physical world. The challenge can become managing situations that were not expected.

In the first part, I outlined some of the terms associated with the delivery of IoT. Next, let’s look at how this gets complex. You will need to read the state of each sensor (through their appropriate API and through their appropriate vendor-supplied hub), create logic to determine what actions must be taken when certain conditions are met, and then deliver these as a workflow to each responder, and confirm through data collected from sensors that the requested change was implemented.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a wonderful marketing term given to devices that are connected to the internet. Today everything from light switches, air conditioners to door locks have the option of being internet-connected. Now that multiple companies have created “tags” that you can add to anything from keys to cars and packages, anything can be tracked. Across the business, industry, and retail almost every physical component has the option of being internet-connected.