Businesses’ growing desire for more and more public cloud services is showing no signs of slowing down, according to the latest figures from Gartner. The analyst house predicted global public cloud spending will rise 20.4% in 2022 to a total of $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021. In 2023, Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud computing will reach nearly $600 billion.

Slowdowns caused by system disruption and complexities in your IT environment are more than an operational headache. They can have a direct impact on the bottom line. While it’s enormously important to make IT systems more efficient and give time back to the organization, it’s just as important to recognize the value of that time and understand the best ways to allocate it between workers, apps, and infrastructure.

I was intrigued by two recent IoT related survey and reports. They emphasise use cases about efficiencies and return on investments but, surprisingly, there is no mention of people-safety nor productivity. I think it is imperative to place people at the heart of the IoT universe. Today, people related use cases have been greatly understated. We will be doing a great injustice if we continue to ignore the human angle.

The terms “big data” have been tossed around so much in the past few years that many people see them as nothing but buzz words. And while it’s true, they are buzz words, they also signify a very large and very real trend that is happening across a huge number of industries right now. As technology continues to progress and evolve, big data plays an even bigger role and is causing sectors and businesses to reimagine processes and systems.

There has been a lot of coverage of machine learning (ML) for biological research, for radiology, and for other uses where the direct users are academics, researchers, and medical professionals. However, there is an opportunity for some biological information to be useful in the retail industry. One area is in skincare.

Interest is growing in cloud computing’s ability to reduce carbon, but the ‘green cloud’ argument is not as clear as many believe. I’ve argued over the years that cloud computing is a step in the right direction when it comes to sustainable computing. My viewpoint often opposes environmental organizations that argue against the many new power-hungry data centers that cloud companies build.

I was intrigued by two recent IoT related survey and reports. They emphasize use cases about efficiencies and return on investments but, surprisingly, there is no mention of people-safety nor productivity. I think it is imperative to place people at the heart of the IoT universe. Today, people related use cases have been greatly understated. We will be doing a great injustice if we continue to ignore the human angle.

Refereeing decisions at the World Cup have been debated decades later. From whether the ball crossed the line in the final in 1966, through Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” two decades later, to some of the decisions made by the video assistant referee at Russia 2018, any perceived mistake by the referee will be scrutinized by fans years later. Referees need all the help they can get, and they could be about to be given a hand from artificial intelligence.

Developers strive to produce efficient code. Many times, developers will add code to their repositories and test it to make sure it works, but they are forgetting one very important step: benchmarking! Benchmarking allows developers to see the performance impact on their code output. If properly integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, it could prevent catastrophic drops in performance before any code is shipped/deployed at all.

Don’t let your organization fall victim to data exposure; a well-defined strategy will cover all aspects of the cloud shared responsibility model and keep your data secure. Not long ago, security concerns were the number one reason IT executives hesitated to move workloads to the cloud. Much has changed since then. Security is now considered one of the great strengths of both cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. But that doesn’t mean total security is assured.