by

David Hogg, VP business development, Logistyx Technologies

Companies managing their supply chain operations face the challenges of growing complexities of the global economy, the continuous rise in e-commerce and increasing customer expectations. To help confront these challenges and keep pace with customers needs, companies increasingly understand the importance of digitally transforming their supply chain to increase flexibility, visibility and reduce costs. According to the 2019 MHI Annual Industry Report, 80 percent of survey respondents believe digital supply chains will be the predominant model within just five years.

So what exactly is digital transformation of the supply chain? When it comes to the supply chain in particular, companies have invested more heavily in website and marketing technologies, leaving supply chains under- invested and developed. This is an untenable state of existence given increasing sales and rising customer expectations, which stress brittle, over-extended supply chain networks, processes and systems. These challenges are even more apparent come peak season, or in the face of disrupting events like weather or the current COVID-19 outbreak, which cause companies to react by adding more inventory sources, more options for inbound and outbound fulfillment supply, and technologies capable of instant reaction/change to mitigate disruption as best possible.

For example, in the world of parcel shipping, as more online sellers offer perks like free shipping and next- or even same-day delivery, customers expectations keep climbing higher. When faced with disruptions, shippers have a need to add new carriers instantly in order to extend last-mile fulfillment from a nice to have to a potentially existential necessity.

Digital transformation of supply chains requires a wide range of tools for automation and AI, including such innovations as self-driving trucks, drones, 3D printing, inventory management systems, warehouse robotics and more. Note that, although recurrent seasonal peaks can be dealt with via AI, rare and unusual disrupting events like COVID-19 still require human intervention. AI requires datasets to provide past experience and deals better with recurrent challenges like season peak or weather events.

COVID-19 aside, as cloud computing and other advancements make new tools and technologies more accessible, even the smallest organizations can opt in to a digital transformation, which leaves larger organizations no choice if they want to stay competitive. To effectively adapt to the digital transformation of the supply chain and better understand opportunities to optimize processes to deliver more value, companies need to consider their ideal business outcomes to determine the best path forward.

Automation and the power of moving shipping to the cloud

For companies looking to enhance the way they execute supply chain outcomes, automating processes for sourcing and delivering goods through the cloud can offer a clearer view into the supply chain and give organizations improved access to data to drive better business decisions.

Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure helps shippers ensure all their information is updated automatically, happening behind the scenes in real time, while also providing flexibility to do things more quickly, including onboarding more carrier services. Increasing their carrier network enables shippers to decrease costs while often improving or expanding customer service. Shippers can make more nimble business decisions with access to a wider cloud-based carrier network and the capability to harness real-time shipping data and run analytics to help evaluate carrier performance, uncover savings opportunities and inform carrier contract negotiations.

Digital access to carriers and supply chain data can also help shippers become digitally mature, improve productivity, maintain or improve customer service, prevent losses and decrease transportation spend. Omnichannel retailers in particular can benefit from a digital supply chain. Digitally-mature shippers have technology running their inventory management, order management and shipping all in one integrated system, allowing them to easily capture data from different systems to optimize the customer experience and minimize the cost of increasingly complex supply chain processes. Cloud-based shipping software enables companies to leverage a single system to manage multiple carrier contracts, comply with label and documentation requirements for each, and see the long-term impact of various carrier service rates streamlining order fulfillment ops and setting each parcel up for cost-effective, accurate and on-time delivery before it leaves the warehouse.

Data security in the cloud

While it has its advantages, with digital transformation comes new and continually increasing security concerns, particularly with regard to privacy, access and data location. Parcel shipping ecosystems contain all sorts of personal information, including names, addresses and phone numbers. However, a dependable cloud-based shipping system can potentially provide more robust data security than a company could by itself particularly if theres a lack of deep IT resources, staff, controls or expertise in-house.

Data privacy and security guidelines, standards and laws vary across regions (such as GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, etc.), so its important that a cloud-based shipping solution is backed by a global strategy with rapid implementation and rollout of adjustments to ensure compliance with data security and privacy requirements, with the ability for companies to monitor and address security and privacy legislation both on the home front and across borders.

End-to-end visibility into last-mile delivery

Digital supply chains can help companies provide full visibility into customer deliveries and increase transparency by leveraging real-time performance data and connecting the end-to-end transportation cycle. Utilizing a cloud-based shipping solution allows organizations to easily integrate with all the relevant carriers and partners. From there, they can select the best, most efficient carrier service for last-mile delivery based on actual carrier performance to identify the optimal route with the lowest cost implications and/or fastest delivery times.

For some shippers, most of the job may seem complete when the parcel leaves the warehouse; for customers, this marks the beginning. The ability to keep customers updated on all shipments in real-time is essential. Cloud-based shipping solutions offer control tower visibility and dashboard reporting which facilitate proactive delivery event management and carrier performance monitoring to allow customer service to intervene if needed to keep deliveries on track, increasing transparency and customer satisfaction.

Charting the digital transformation journey

Theres no one-size-fits-all cloud-based shipping solution, and many shippers start with hybrid solutions once they realize the benefits to be gained by just partially embracing the cloud.Each company has a unique strategy, infrastructure and budget; finding the best solution usually comes down to clarifying an organizations particular business needs.Companies dont have to have all the answers or transform their digital supply chain all at once. Many shades of grey exist between completely on-premise and completely cloud-based solutions. Each delivery model has its advantages and disadvantages, and the ideal delivery model for each shippers digital transformation journey depends on a variety of factors.

A hybrid delivery model combines both SaaS and hosted solutions. From the users perspective, theres only one shipping system in place, but a peek behind the curtain will reveal both cloud-based and on-premise servers at work.

A hybrid shipping solution is ideal for organizations that want control over where their data is stored but realize the benefits of global accessibility. For example, they might store sensitive customer data on their private cloud and use a public cloud to manage the rest of their shipping operations.

Today, most organizations prefer a SaaS-based shipping solution over their hosted or hybrid counterparts.In fact, according to Gartner, global SaaS revenues could hit $113.1 billion by 2021, a 30% increase from 2019. Since SaaS TMS solutions are cloud based, theyre more time-efficient when it comes to sharing and managing shipping data on an ongoing basis, meaning that organizations receive a double benefit: time savings upfront and over the long-term. Compared with manual processes or traditional on-premise solutions, cloud-based solutions also make it easier to access, aggregate and analyze data.

Riding the wave of digital transformation in the supply chain is not optional. Growing customer expectations and rising competition in the marketplace make digitalization a mandatory progression for shippers looking to succeed. Each business has unique needs and supply chain priorities that will determine which digital solutions are the best fit. Ultimately, embracing the cloud makes supply chain innovation more sustainable, helping organizations improve their parcel shipping operations and generate a quick ROI.

David Hogg

David Hogg, VP Business Development, Logistyx Technologies is a highly experienced business executive who has lived and worked on three continents. His career has been focused on digital transformation for e-commerce and supply chain solutions with core industrial domains in retail, CPG, pharmaceuticals and wholesale/distribution. LinkedIn profile.

More here:
Supply Chain Embraces the Cloud to Drive Digital Transformation - EPS News

Today Rescale, in cooperation with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, announced a new program that immediately offers high performance computing resources at no cost to teams working to develop test kits and vaccines for COVID-19.

Those working on coronavirus vaccines and testing who would benefit from HPC in the cloud at no cost should apply at techagainstcovid.com. Researchers can rapidly run simulations in the cloud without setup time or IT teams using Rescales turnkey platform combined with cloud computing resources from Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

For decades, bioscience and pharmaceutical companies have been using high performance computing to develop and validate new solutions and drugs. With this technology now available via the cloud at no cost, researchers from around the globe can speed up COVID-19 vaccine discovery by ramping up and collaborating from anywhere.

Rescales platform can provide access to high-performance computing resources that can help accelerate key processes and enable stronger collaboration, said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. As a partner of Rescale, were grateful that they will make these resources, including Google Cloud computing capabilities, available to more researchers and organizations.

Greg Moore, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health added, Were inspired to team up with Rescale in the fight against time to help provide answers to address COVID-19. To enable researchers and organizations to develop new therapeutics and vaccines faster, were working together to accelerate the availability of Azure supercomputers in the cloud.

As a leading life sciences company, we believe it is our duty to step up and help to stop this deadly and devastating pandemic, said Erik Holmlin, PhD, CEO of Bionano Genomics. Bionanos genome imaging technology can identify variation in genome structure better than any sequencing-based method, which makes us uniquely positioned to help identify variants in the human genome that can protect against or predispose to the viral infection. We have set up studies to identify such variants around the globe, and having Bionanos bioinformatic tools already integrated onto Rescales high performance computing platform enables us to scale up these studies rapidly across multiple continents.

With the introduction of cloud HPC, Rescale, a Microsoft M12 portfolio company, makes massive workloads solvable in a scalable, customized time frame. By eliminating the need to maintain an on-premises supercomputer, cloud HPC allows startups and enterprises alike to develop new drugs and vaccines faster than ever.

Leading cloud companies need to pitch in, and we have the responsibility to help in any way we can, said Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale. Rescale is making every effort working closely with our cloud provider partners to eliminate bottlenecks and costs so researchers achieve breakthroughs faster.

We will work around the clock to make these findings available to the scientific and public health communities, said Holmlin, and hope that we can contribute to vaccine or drug development, better triage and treatment of patients, and overall management of the disease and epidemic.

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Continued here:
Rescale Partners with Google Cloud and Azure to Offer Cloud HPC for COVID-19 Researchers - insideHPC

An unexpected rival has emerged that could give Intel and AMD a run for their money, at least in the very lucrative server and cloud computing market.

Amazons new Graviton2 CPU has been tested extensively by Andrei Frumusanu from our sister website AnandTech, and the results show this new kid on the block outstrips the incumbents when it comes to performance per dollar.

Graviton2 was tested against two other cloud computing resources offered by Amazon Web Services: the m5a (AMD EPYC 7571) and m5n (Intel Xeon Platinum 8259CL Cascade Lake). Andrei found it could offer savings of up to 54%, which he says represents "a massive shakeup for the AWS and EC2 ecosystem.

So, how did Amazon achieve these results? The chip comes from Annapurna Labs and packs 64 A76 ARM cores - similar to what you can find in a smartphone - with 33MB cache and a high clock speed. Amazon is Annapurna Labs' only customer (as its owner), which means the processor is extremely fine-tuned for AWS workloads.

According to Andrei, unless you're tied to the x86 platform, you'd be stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 instances once they become more widely available for everything from VPN (AWS VPN) to web hosting (AWS Light Sail).

For now, expect AMDs EPYC2 processors to put up a bit of a fight - at least until Graviton3 lands.

Originally posted here:
AMD and Intel have a formidable new foe but youll never guess who it is - TechRadar India

The computer engine rooms that power the digital economy have become surprisingly energy efficient.

A new study of data centers globally found that while their computing output jumped sixfold from 2010 to 2018, their energy consumption rose only 6 percent. The scientists findings suggest concerns that the rise of mammoth data centers would generate a surge in electricity demand and pollution have been greatly overstated.

The major force behind the improving efficiency is the shift to cloud computing. In the cloud model, businesses and individuals consume computing over the internet as services, from raw calculation and data storage to search and social networks.

The largest cloud data centers, sometimes the size of football fields, are owned and operated by big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.

Each of these sprawling digital factories, housing hundreds of thousands of computers, rack upon rack, is an energy-hungry behemoth. Some have been built near the Arctic for natural cooling and others beside huge hydroelectric plants in the Pacific Northwest.

Still, they are the standard setters in terms of the amount of electricity needed for a computing task. The public thinks these massive data centers are energy bad guys, said Eric Masanet, the lead author of the study. But those data centers are the most efficient in the world.

The study findings were published on Thursday in an article in the journal Science. It was a collaboration of five scientists at Northwestern University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an independent research firm. The project was funded by the Department of Energy and by a grant from a Northwestern alumnus who is an environmental philanthropist.

The new research is a stark contrast to often-cited predictions that energy consumption in the worlds data centers is on a runaway path, perhaps set to triple or more over the next decade. Those worrying projections, the study authors say, are simplistic extrapolations and what-if scenarios that focus mainly on the rising demand for data center computing.

By contrast, the new research is a bottom-up analysis that compiles information on data center processors, storage, software, networking and cooling from a range of sources to estimate actual electricity use. Enormous efficiency improvements, they conclude, have allowed computing output to increase sharply while power consumption has been essentially flat.

Were hopeful that this research will reset peoples intuitions about data centers and energy use, said Jonathan Koomey, a former scientist at the Berkeley lab who is an independent researcher.

Over the years, data center electricity consumption has been a story of economic incentives and technology advances combining to tackle a problem.

From 2000 to 2005, energy use in computer centers doubled. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency forecast another doubling of power consumed by data centers from 2005 to 2010.

In 2011, at the request of The New York Times, Mr. Koomey made an assessment of how much data center electricity consumption actually did increase between 2005 and 2010. He estimated the global increase at 56 percent, far less than previously expected. The recession after the 2008 financial crisis played a role, but so did gains in efficiency. The new study, with added data, lowered that 2005 to 2010 estimate further.

But the big improvements have come in recent years. Since 2010, the study authors write in Science, the data center landscape has changed dramatically.

The tectonic shift has been to the cloud. In 2010, the researchers estimated that 79 percent of data center computing was done in smaller traditional computer centers, largely owned and run by non-tech companies. By 2018, 89 percent of data center computing took place in larger, utility-style cloud data centers.

The big cloud data centers use tailored chips, high-density storage, so-called virtual-machine software, ultrafast networking and customized airflow systems all to increase computing firepower with the least electricity.

The big tech companies eke out every bit of efficiency for every dollar they spend, said Mr. Masanet, who left Northwestern last month to join the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Google is at the forefront. Its data centers on average generate seven times more computing power than they did just five years ago, using no more electricity, according to Urs Hlzle, a senior vice president who oversees Googles data center technology.

In 2018, data centers consumed about 1 percent of the worlds electricity output. That is the energy-consumption equivalent of 17 million American households, a sizable amount of energy use but barely growing.

The trend of efficiency gains largely offsetting rising demand should hold for three or four years, the researchers conclude. But beyond a few years, they say, the outlook is uncertain.

In the Science article, they recommend steps including more investment in energy-saving research and improved measurement and information sharing by data center operators worldwide.

The next few years, they write, will be a critical transition phase to ensure a low-carbon and energy-efficient future.

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Cloud Computing Is Not the Energy Hog That Had Been Feared - The New York Times

Cloud computing is gradually becoming the preferred choice of businesses to streamline different business processes. As per industry reports around 68% of the businesses use cloud technology while 19% are planning to integrate cloud computing into their business operations. There are also many reasons for companies switching from the traditional business approach to cloud computing. It has been seen that companies that invest in cloud, big data, security, and mobility have witnessed revenue growth of up to 52 percent and these are compelling figures to state why implementing cloud computing helps in the efficient running of the organization and better assist the customers.Besides just helping businesses with better revenue figures the cloud computing services provide numerous benefits such as:

AccessibilityScalabilityCollaborationPay structureControl choicesData securityTool selectionSecurity featuresSavings on equipmentSpeed to marketStorage optionsStreamlined workRegular updatesCompetitive edge

But with the widespread use of cloud computing, many security threats have also evolved over the past few years because the approach of cloud computing has gone through some transformation. Though the cloud environment is more secure than the on-premise environment still there are security concerns that need to be addressed. So lets look at the security threats to cloud computing and what measures can be taken to assure the full-proof cloud environment.

The biggest threat to any cloud environment is a breach of data. The main reason behind data breach is when an unauthorized person or program gets access to the data. It becomes a serious concern for organizations because data breach puts all or partial data at risk because the intruder can view, copy and transmit the confidential data for whatever reason possible.

Data loss is the opposite of data breach because it can occur either due to natural factors or human errors. Physical destruction of the servers due to natural calamities or human targeted attacks can lead to data loss. This is a great setback for businesses because there are few chances of recovering the data.3. DoS or Denial of ServiceThis is an advanced form of attack done primarily to flood the system with immense traffic and take advantage of the situation when the system cannot buffer or crashed through bugs and vulnerabilities. This is one of the most used media to shut down the cloud services and making them temporarily unavailable for the customers.

This security risk is related to take advantage of the growing cryptocurrency frenzy. The hackers install crypto-mining script on the servers which increases CPU load and slows down the overall system. The users computing resources are exploited to process numerous transactions of cryptocurrency.

This is the most common hijacking in the cloud environment where the hackers take advantage of insecure passwords and gain access to the cloud through a staffs account. The hacker can manipulate the data and can interfere with the different processes of the business.

This isnt the hijacking of the server itself but is more related to the third-party services. Internet of Things or IoT solutions is responsible for a data breach to a certain extent. IoT devices like home appliances, connected cars, health monitors tend to collect and send a huge amount of data in real-time. This real-time data is vulnerable and hackers can hijack it by hacking the APIs.

Not every system is full-proof because even if external security threats are nullified then also internal risks like an employee exploiting the privacy and initiating data breach are very feasible. Besides this, unintentional human errors can also put the cloud environment open to malware and cyber-attacks.

As per phishprotection.com conducting regular security, assessments are the best way to safeguard the cloud infrastructure. An up-to-date cloud system and third-party tools from reliable service providers are very vital to protect the data from going into unauthorized hands.The cloud security monitoring using Artificial Intelligence can help in identify and counter-attack the potential danger and helps in safeguarding the cloud infrastructure.Encrypting the data before uploading to the cloud system to ensure data privacy.Making employees aware of potential security threats is a great way to eliminate human errors.Having a data recovery plan helps to minimize the impact of data loss. Backing up data to a centralized server regularly also helps in protecting the data.Hiring cloud security professionals makes sure that a business stays away from cloud-related threats.As per proofpoint.com the access management policies should be very strict. It has been stated by CISA that only the most trusted or the person who needs access should be grant access to. Considering biometric authentication and multi-factor methods is a good move.Securing the cloud infrastructure is not as easy as securing your PC with antivirus like avast.com or following 10 steps for ransomware protection. The scale at which cloud computing operates and the importance of data flowing through different cloud servers is so huge that even a slight technical glitch can cost the company millions of dollars. But like every other technology the risk factors are always there and the only thing required is attentiveness to deal with all sorts of security threats.

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Cloud Computing Security Risks and How to Protect Cloud Customers from Ransomware - Customer Think