The best disc golf professionals will make their way to Central Minnesota thisweekend for The Preserve Championship.

The tournament will take place atAirborn Disc Golf Preserve in Clearwater, Minnesota. This weekend is one of a handful of disc golf tournaments throughout the country as the top professionals compete for the top spot not only at The Preserve, but in the tour.

This disc golf course was designed by one of the top disc golf professionals in the world,Cale Leiviska, back in May 2020.

"Cale has built a great course," said Seth Fendley, operations director for the Disc Golf Pro Tour. "That property has three disc golf courses on it and he takes and creates a larger scale championship course out of those three courses. He pairs it down into one and creates a championship course for the tournament."

Since the opening, Airborn Disc Golf Preserve has been a popular place for many disc golf enthusiasts, especially in the Minnesota area. There are three courses at the Clearwater location.

READ MORE:World-class disc golfer opens high-caliber courses in Clearwater

Timberwolf and Lynx are more for the experienced disc golf player as there are plenty of obstacles and challenges throughout the course. The Red Fox was made for the inexperienced disc golfers as it's a par three and helps new players develop a love for the sport.

This weekend, the players will play on the Black Bear course, which is a par 65 for men and par 66 for women. There's about 10,000 feet of layout for both of the courses for the two genders.

All of these courses are located right next to the Mississippi River in Clearwater and the area used to be an old golf course, so it was a perfect opportunity for Leiviska to make into a disc golf course.

"Minnesota, in and of itself, is one of the major states for disc golf in the United States," Fendley said. "You only have like California and Texas that have more disc golfers in it. The crazy thing about it is that in Minnesota you can disc golf year round but most people don't want to whereas California and Texas you can disc golf all year.

"That's just a testament to show how strong Minnesota disc golf is in the country."

The Preserve Championship will start on Friday and finish on Sunday with the best disc golf players in the country, and even the world. The 2021 women's world champion,Catrina Allen, will be playing this weekend and she's actually from Pipestone, Minnesota.

The 2021 men's world champion,James Conrad, will also be playing this weekend along with many other top players on both the men's and women's side.

There will be 30 men from Minnesota playing in the tournament including three from St. Cloud:Aidan Guthrie,Jonny Twofingers Estes andLouis LaPorta. There will also be seven women from Minnesota playing this weekend and none are from the St. Cloud area.

"We have the best of the best playing this weekend in Clearwater," Fendley said. "It'll be a good weekend with a lot of competition."

The Preserve Championship had its inaugural tournament last year andNikko Locastro narrowly edged out a win over Calvin Heimburg and Simon Lizotte for the men. On the women's side,Paige Pierce brought home the victory over Catrina Allen andMissy Gannon.

The Disc Golf Pro Tour and Leiviska agreed to have a maximum of 1000 people at this weekend's event. They believe they can host more on the course, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they wanted to keep the tournament controlled.

The tickets for the weekend are sold out as there were only 100 tickets still available heading into this final week, but those are bought out by the middle of the week.

If people couldn't buy tickets to the event and still want to watch the action from the weekend, there's a live stream option to watch the top leaders online. The live stream can be found at Disc Golf Network and it's a paid subscription.

Fendley said the Disc Golf Pro Tour plans to return to Airborn Disc Golf Preserve for future years to continue a yearly tournament.

"The Preserve is a beautiful course with plenty of challenges for these players," Fendley said. "I know a lot of them are looking forward to playing this weekend."

Brian Mozey is the high school sports reporter for the St. Cloud Times. Reach him at 320-255-8772or bmozey@stcloudtimes.com. Follow him on Twitter @BrianMozey.

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The Preserve hosts pro disc golf tournament this weekend in Clearwater - SC Times

Laurent Michel, director of public affairs at Platform.sh, looks at how businesses can effectively navigate data sovereignty

Data legislation across the world can be difficult to navigate.

Where is your data? This was a simple question to answer not too long ago, when you could simply point to a server. Today, its far more difficult, and not simply because of the cloud.

Businesses do not build their online presence overnight. It grows as the company grows and new needs arise. More developers get involved, and data flows may not be as clear as they once were. Once a business becomes a multinational, the problem can quickly get out of control. Add all this in with political uncertainty and the software tools available today it makes it very difficult for companies to try to innovate while maintaining data governance across all websites and web applications.

Data sovereignty is the concept that data is subject to the laws of the country which it is processed in. In a world where there is a rapid adoption of SaaS, cloud and hosted services, it becomes obvious to see the issues that data sovereignty can have.

In simpler times, data wasnt something businesses needed to be concerned about and could be shared and transferred freely with no consequence. Businesses that also had a digital presence operated on a small scale and with low data demands hosted on on-premise infrastructure. This meant that data could be monitored and kept secure, much different from the more distributed and hybrid systems that many businesses use today.

With so much data sharing and lack of regulation, it all came crashing down with the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, promoting strict laws on privacy.

Frederik Maris, vice-president, EMEA at Splunk, spoke to Information Age about the split European perceptions around data. Read here

The concept that data may be subject to the laws of more than one country presents mounting challenges for organisations. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one such regulation that sent shockwaves throughout the world of IT. The regulation applies to the processing of EU residents personal data, regardless of where that processing takes place. If a company is not GDPR compliant, it risks regulatory fines of up to 20 million or 4% of global annual turnover (whichever is greater).

Fines are no empty threat either, over the course of 2020 more than 220 fines for GDPR were handed out. Though even with this threat, many companies still struggle to manage their own data strategy.

GDPR was the first major data compliance regulation but is not the only one. As businesses operate more internationally, they will need to be aware of the data policies from the region they are collecting from and where they are storing it.

When dealing with on-premise infrastructure, governance is clearer, as it must follow the rules of the country its in. However, when its in the cloud, a business can store its data in any number of locations regardless of where the business itself is. Its down to the business to make sure it is aware of where the data is being secured and that it is compliant wherever it is.

Many small businesses take advantage of the cost savings associated with large cloud hosting providers such as Google and Microsoft. When looking at this in the context of sovereignty, it begs the question over who is responsible for its governance. To make matters more complicated, cloud vendors dont always inform customers of the regulatory stakes of selecting one cloud region.

Azure for example operates on a shared responsibility model where depending on the service a customer is using they could be part responsible for a breach or misuse of data. As cloud usage increases, its important for teams to be fully aware of their responsibilities to avoid any issues.

Jack Watts, EMEA leader, AI at NetApp, discusses the need to double down on cloud deployments when it comes to the AI journey. Read here

Gartner predicts that cloud spending will reach $332 billion by the end of 2021, so with more complexity in the future and likely more regulation, businesses will need to get a tighter grasp on their data. Heres a few ways that they can do this:

As countries begin to adopt more complex data governance policies, the job will be on CTOs to navigate through this complexity and make sure that they have an accurate view of the whole business cloud environment, to ensure they are secure, compliant and responsible. Ultimately, selecting the right partner that offers solutions that combine performance, price predictability and total sovereignty over data to support growth is imperative.

The rest is here:
Navigating data sovereignty through complexity - Information Age

LOS ANGELES, July 30, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- GeekTek, the boutique managed IT services provider and consultancy headquartered in Los Angeles, and winner of various awards from CRN, MSPmentor, and Channel Partner Insight, including 2019 MSP of the Year, announced today that it was rebranding as XOverture.

According to GeekTek Founder and CEO/CTO Eric Schlissel, "The new brand better encapsulates the quality and professionalism of our services; the personality and values of our company; and our status as a rapidly-growing premium IT services and consulting firm that embraces progress and change."

The revamped branding can be viewed on the company's new website, XOverture.com.

A New Brand for the "New Normal" and Beyond

The company, established in 1998 and operating under the GeekTek name for over two decades, is known for its value-oriented and compassionate, partner-like approach to IT services and consulting, which combines top-tier, CIO-level guidance with award-winning services and support.

It operates internationally with offices in locations including Los Angeles, Toronto, and Hyderabad, and clients in multiple countries including the US, Canada, the UK, and Japan.

In an email to current clients sent last month, Schlissel said the idea for the rebrand came about during a "quiet period" last year after the company had shifted all of their clients to "the new normal of remote work".

"We took the opportunity to reflect, ask some big questions, and challenge our assumptions. What we quickly discovered was the disconnect between who we are and how our brand shows up in the marketplace."

An IT Overture to Business Success

According to an FAQ on the company's website, the name XOverture is meant to convey they are an "'overture' to success and growth for businesses through the masterful deployment and orchestration of IT."

In addition to the new name, the visual style of the new brand is meant to be "modern and clean yet also relatively light, reflecting an experienced, dependable, high-tech services and consulting company that's friendly and approachable and is a pleasure to work with."

Looking Ahead

Regarding future plans, the company stated that their "Our top priority is continuing to support and secure our current clients as well as we can. That includes the continual refinement of our support processes, retaining and bringing on quality technical talent, and keeping up on the latest developments in tech to ensure we're providing you with the best IT advice, management, and protection."

As for existing clients, Schlissel stated in his email, "the new branding will not result in any changes to your services, pricing, main points of contact, or dedicated support team. There will also be no changes to how you interact with our team, and all existing communication methods will continue to work."

The rebranding follows the 2020 spinoff of GeekTek's cannabis IT services operations into a new company called Cure8 (http://www.cure8.tech), in order to better support the unique needs of the one-of-kind and fast-growing cannabis industry. Cure8 already works with leading cannabis companies including Canopy Growth, Tweed, Tokyo Smoke, Superette, Spiritleaf, and Northern Helm, and is expected to expand its footprint throughout the US and Canada in 2021 and into 2022.

Moving forward, both XOverture and Cure8 will operate under the parent company Base8, whose name also hints at the team's musical interests, being a reference to both computing and the octal musical scale.

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About XOverture

XOverture, formerly known as GeekTek, is a boutique IT services company that provides small & medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with the IT guidance, structure, & support they need to grow.

They're known for their top-tier service quality, industry-best response times, and partner-like approach. Services they offer include 24/7 managed services, full IT audits, IT project management, and cloud hosting and management.

Their approach to IT services emphasizes:

Media Contact

Shankar Iyerh, XOverture, +1 (323) 987-7771, marketing@xoverture.com

Twitter

SOURCE XOverture

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GeekTek, MSP of the Year, to Rebrand as XOverture - WFMZ Allentown

Open-source software is prolific in technology today. Just about everything from supercomputers to consumer electronics is powered by at least one piece of open source code.

But many businesses find themselves launching open-source products at a rapidly accelerating pace without truly understanding either the benefits that come with it or the potential pitfalls that must be avoided.

Lets talk about what open source means to your business, and how you can leverage it to serve both your customers and your business needs.

What exactly is open-source software? The open-source movement originated decades ago as a philosophical commitment to providing truly free (as in speech) software. This philosophy sternly rejected any attempts to commercialize or otherwise limit the use of such applications.

However, open-source developers today typically adopt a more nuanced approach, prioritizing accessibility and long-term sustainability of their projects over an unwavering commitment to absolute neutrality.

Some common tenets of modern open source include:

Although simple in concept, there are many open source licenses in common use. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of open source communities, has approved dozens of licenses as qualifying for open source per their policy. It should be recognized that the OSI itself has no legal authority on the validity of a license and acts merely as an industry steward.

Why so many licenses?

Some project authors want to retain a measure of control over their work to ensure that attribution is retained and that any modifications to their work must also be published as open source.

In such cases, a more restrictive (sometimes called copyleft) license such as GPLv3 is typically chosen. Other authors may not care as much about these considerations and opt for a more liberal license such as the MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses.

Selecting the best license for a project is a common source of confusion, so much so that GitHub has created a tool dedicated to helping guide inexperienced developers in making the decision.

With an understanding of the open-source concept, its only natural to ask why a business would entertain the idea of giving away software that took time and money to create. But there are plenty of ways that open source can benefit your business.

Leveraging Community Support

Many of the tools developed by your business dont contribute directly to its bottom line. For instance, I developed NetBox to help manage network infrastructure while working as a network engineer at DigitalOcean, a cloud hosting provider.

The software was certainly valuable, but it wasnt something we were positioned to sell directly to our customers. So, we decided to release it to the public as an open source project. In exchange, we received a ton of ideas and contributions from external collaborators who helped improve and maintain the software for everyones benefit, including our own.

Product Fit Testing

Suppose you have an idea for a new product and want to test its fit in the market. You might consider launching the initial product with only essential features under an open source license. This will allow you to gauge market interest in the product and, assuming there is sufficient interest, provide a way to collect feedback from early adopters to address bugs and request additional features well in advance of the full products launch.

Promote Brand Awareness

Open-source projects need not be large or complex endeavors. In fact, many of the most useful projects comprise just a few hundred lines of code: perhaps a handy utility or convenient library useful to other developers. Some arent even code at all, but curated collections of notes or resources.

Such projects are fairly cheap to develop and maintain, but help to amplify your companys brand within the community. Having already correlated your brand with a useful resource in the mind of a potential customer makes them more likely to consider your paid products.

Open Source as the Product

Perhaps paradoxically, the requirement that open source be made freely available does not preclude it from being sold. Many successful businesses have been built around selling primarily open-source products, usually by offering additional value in the form of support or extending functionality.

One of the most common approaches to commercialized open source is offering paid support and/or hosting for an open-source product. For example, WordPress is an extremely popular open-source content management system. Anyone can download and install it for free, but they also have the option of purchasing a subscription through wordpress.com. Their paid support plans include hosting, support, and other features and integrations depending on the pricing tier selected.

Another commercialization strategy is to split a product into both open-source and closed-source components, an approach referred to as open core. GitLab, a software development tool, is one such example. While the base product is made available for free as open source, many of its more advanced features are limited to paid versions.

Depending on the nature of your product, this approach can be a good fit as you reap the benefits of having an open-source community while also securing revenue from advanced users.

Launching an Open-Source Product

When you first publish an open-source project, its important to have a plan for drawing people to participate. It can be surprisingly difficult to give something away. One impediment is the absence of a price tag. Were so accustomed to relying on price as an objective (though not always accurate) indicator of value that it can be difficult to convey the value of a free product.

The most successful open-source projects focus on solving specific problems or fulfilling a well-defined set of needs. When publicizing your project, explain why you decided to create a new project versus using something that already exists, and how users can expect to gain from adopting your solution.

Be specific: Does it address a use case not covered well by existing solutions? Is it faster? More configurable? Your projects introductory document (often a simple README file) should spell out its value proposition in no more than a few sentences.

Once you have this in place, youll need to actively work on drawing people to your project. This can be done through marketing and social channels, but theres a line to tread. You dont want to be perceived as spammy or overly promotional, as this will quickly turn people off.

Consider what types of users would benefit most from adopting your software, and how you can best reach them. Blog posts demonstrating (and not just talking about) the benefits of your software tend to be very powerful; videos even more so. You can leverage social channels to promote these rather than linking directly to the project itself.

Depending on the nature of your project, you might also benefit by actively seeking out complaints about problems that you can solve. For example, perhaps youve developed an API client for a particular service or technology. Keep watch for people struggling in that area and suggest how your project may be of service to them where appropriate.

Twitter, Stack Overflow, and public chats can be especially good mediums for this sort of interaction. But again, dont be spammy. People tend to have a higher tolerance for the promotion of open-source software relative to paid products, but its still a pretty low threshold. Only interject when youre reasonably confident that the audience stands to benefit from what you have to say.

Participating in External Open-Source Projects

Your business can also benefit from engaging with external open-source projects. Perhaps there are open-source tools your business relies upon that would benefit from your contributions. Or maybe there are community-maintained projects that enable your customers to better consume your commercial offerings. Contributing to outside open source projects can yield benefits both tangible and intangible.

When considering an external contribution, its crucial to first understand the projects contribution policy. Well-established projects will typically have a formal document spelling out how contributions are to be proposed and submitted, whereas a smaller project may simply rely on established convention. Take some time to familiarize yourself with recent contributions to the project and make an earnest effort to abide by their precedent.

Also consider the real value of your proposed contribution to the projects user base. Contrary to popular belief, proposed contributions to open-source projects do place a substantial burden on a projects maintainers. Each submission must be carefully reviewed for appropriateness, functionality, security, documentation, and so on before it can be merged into the project. Unsolicited changes are often more of a burden than a boon for maintainers.

When in doubt, always discuss your proposal with the maintainers before proceeding with a submission of new code for review.

Given the continued growth of and interest in open-source software in recent years, theres no question that the trend will continue well into the foreseeable future.

By establishing and nurturing open-source communities focused both internally and externally, businesses as well as their customers can benefit tremendously.

Its clear that corporations that adopt an open-source strategy in earnest will be well positioned to lead in their markets.

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Corporate Participation in the Open Source Community | Expert Advice - LinuxInsider.com