Beinex Planethon: Run for our health! Run for our planet

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How AI Decision-Making is Improving Enterprise Outcomes

The context

There is a popular perception that a desktop job in IT is synonymous with ill health. As the pandemic swept the globe and knocked down everything on its path from lives to livelihood, the IT industry continued to prosper due to the explosive growth in the digital arena.

But it came accompanied with its own set of problems and challenges. Long working hours and sedentary lifestyle have taken its toll. The incidence of lifestyle diseases for knowledge workers went in tandem with the northward growth map of the IT industry.

The Beinex difference

Beinex was an exception to this rule; thanks to the fitness challenge it had initiated as a part of its Autumn Connect programme: a competition for its employees with a slew of challenges they took on enthusiastically from cooking healthy food to addressing fitness goals.

Beinex Planethon

In sync with this spirit, and to promote it further, Beinex conducted ‘Beinex Planethon’.

Date: April 07, 2022

Time: 7.00 AM- 8.00 AM IST

Venue: JNI Stadium, Kochi, India

It was a jovial day for us, even as we had to report at the JNI premises by 6.30 AM. The morning was pleasant and by the time it became 7.00 AM, all of us had assembled at the flag-off location.

Shiny Justine and her daughter Surya Ann Justine flagged off the Marathon. Shiny Justine delivered an inspirational speech before the flag off. She exhorted the gathering to make fitness initiatives habitual. She spoke to us that it takes just a small percentage of our time to add to fitness and health and it prevents medical exigencies from popping up suddenly.

Post the marathon session she was awarded a memento as a token of our appreciation.

Let us do our bit. Now is the time to draw inspiration and make fitness a habit! Run for our health and yes, run for our planet.

Beinex, in solidarity with the World Health Day 2022 organised a micro-marathon, Beinex Planethon with the motto, "Run for our health! Run for our planet." The Planethon is in line with the vision of the UN. The aspect of planetary health is also important and cannot be divorced from an individual’s health. A planet free of pollution and associated illnesses, a sustainable planet; that is tour aim.

The Planethon was flagged off by acclaimed fitness expert from South India's Kerala, Shiny Justine and her daughter Surya Ann Justine, who holds the title Miss Kerala Sports Physique.

ALTERYX RELEASES 2018.3

Visualytics at every step The Interactive Chart tool replaces the existing Charting tool, which has been deprecated. Now, the interactive charting tool instantly creates and customizes popular chart types and output in both static and interactive formats. The Insight Tool brings your insights to life through interactive dashboards you can share across your organization via the Alteryx Gallery to gain deeper insights into your data. You can create and arrange multiple charts and text elements on the dashboard, create filters for viewing specific data, and create drilldowns to let you change the detail level of data displayed. Deliver answers faster Caching feature in Alteryx Designer allows for a workflow process to be stopped and then restarted from the caching point without starting over which can drastically reduce processing time. Alteryx Server becomes more enterprise-friendly with job prioritization and worker node assignment that enables admins and users to prioritize the most critical jobs to the top of the queue. Alteryx Connect gets smarter by recommending related assets to help you discover other available analytic assets to use in your analysis. Next level analytics The new Python tool with Jupyter Notebook integration is an embedded IDE that allows you to run Python code directly in Alteryx Designer. Adding the big data capabilities – Apache Spark Code tool support – Spark Direct for Databricks on Azure and HDInsight – which allows you to quickly leverage the power of Spark right within a workflow. We encourage you to experience the new capabilities in Alteryx Analytic 2018.3 during our live webinar on September 18th

THE KEY FEATURES OF TABLEAU 2019.1

The Key Features of Tableau 2019.1

I’ve always been a huge Tableau fan and one of the biggest reasons why is that I can always count on Tableau for bringing out new exciting features in every release. With new quarter, Tableau has yet again released a new version after a thorough research based on people’s experience, thoughts and comments. As a result, Tableau 2019.1 has plenty of new and insightful features amongst which is a feature called Ask Data which will make our life so much easier! There are so many other new features which everyone will appreciate, such as Prep Conductor, Automatic Dashboard Phone Layout, URL Action improvements, Nested Sorting improvements, connector for Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse and many more! Here are my top picks from the list. Ask Data Are you not a data analyst but still love to play with data? You have a question in mind but don’t know how to get to the answer from all the data? Just Ask Data! Ask or type the question in your natural language and Tableau will not only give you the answer but also visualize it in a stunning way! We thought this one deserves its own blog with detailed information and so we decided to share one with you, keep your eyes open as it is coming soon to our blog! Prep Conductor Keep your data fresh with Prep Conductor. Tableau Prep is helping organizations with preparing and sorting their data easily. This new addition allows you to automate this process on Tableau Server or Online. You can schedule and manage your data flows created on Prep. It can be seamlessly integrated to your existing schedules of Server or Online. You can manage the permissions to your flow regarding who should run, edit, download and so much more. Nested Sorting Thinking that sorting a hierarchical field would make your work easier? It is the most talked about and wanted feature and Tableau 2019.1 has got you covered! With this feature, you can visually define how you want to sort within multiple dimensions helping to capture the trends in categorical data bringing out wonderful insights. Mobile View Everybody is using smart phones. For everything. Everywhere. Period. Tableau knows it and continues to create more phone friendly features. Now you can create customized mobile layouts for your dashboards even if it’s not listed in default options. This comes in handy when your phone is not listed in the model. Tableau 2019.1 brings to its users customized phone layout for specific uses including interactive offline previews and automatically adding phone layouts to new dash board. Now, others can view your visually stunning creative dashboards via their phone in a sophisticated way. URL Improvements Decide how you want the URL action to work with the new URL improvements in Tableau 2019.1. Target specific URL actions enable the user to control the view of any external information linking to your dataset. Develop intuitive, integrated and innovative dashboards by connecting to all the necessary information outside your data source. Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse Connector Be it on cloud or on premises, Tableau keeps on adding more data connections to make it easy for users to leverage the native way of connecting. This came up with the connector to Microsoft Azure cloud service in the current release. This helps in avoiding ODBC in making connections to the data stored in Microsoft Azure Data warehouse. I’m very excited about all these new features, what about you? Are you interested in learning more about Tableau’s new features or the features that are yet to come in the next versions? Are you a Tableau user and would like to become a Tableau Champion? Or are you new to Tableau and it just seems like something you could use to work with your data? Please contact us at training@beinex.com/ info@beinex.com and we would be happy to schedule a Tableau demo or training for you and your company.

Bias Mitigation, Transparency, and Trust: The Three Foundations of Responsible Enterprise AI

AI is rapidly progressing from experimentation to core enterprise operations. From customer service automation to predictive analytics, organizations are embedding AI into decision-making processes that directly impact customers, employees, and business outcomes.

Learning to Trust Zero Trust

ZTA in Simple Terms

It is a cybersecurity paradigm focused on enterprise resource protection. This includes data; no matter where it resides, cloud or on-premises, and resources like printers, compute resources and Internet of Things (IoT) actuators. The objective of the paradigm is to prevent unauthorised access to data and resources but at the same time enable authorised and approved subject to have access to the same. The word subject can mean user, device or an application/ service. The paradigm also envisions making the access control enforcement as granular as possible. Thus, “Zero trust architecture (ZTA) is an enterprise’s cybersecurity plan that utilizes zero trust concepts and encompasses component relationships, workflow planning, and access policies. Therefore, a zero-trust enterprise is the network infrastructure (physical and virtual) and operational policies that are in place for an enterprise as a product of a zero trust architecture plan.” Zero trust (ZT) provides a collection of concepts and ideas designed to minimize uncertainty in enforcing accurate, least privilege per-request access decisions in information systems and services in the face of a network viewed as compromised. The crux of the concept is that trust must be continually evaluated. If a subject needs access to data or resources, it is granted after authentication and authorisation, but it will not go beyond the minimum privileges needed to perform the mission.

Benefits of Implementing ZTA

The ZTA paradigm comes packed with a slew of benefits:

Supporting employees/ workers with secure and reliable access to a multitude of resources from anywhere using any device, any time
Resource protection irrespective of whether it is on-prem or cloud
Improving visibility and governance: who, what, and how users are accessing enterprise data and apps.
Limiting of insider threat borne of the need-to-know approach to resource access
Limiting of lateral movements of attackers in the system which perimeter security-oriented networks are otherwise prone to.
Limiting the cost for recovery and mitigation
Ensuring confidentiality and security of sensitive enterprise data
Enhanced risk mitigation courtesy of continuous assessment and review of resource access

ZTA: How it Works

The Zero Trust Architecture evaluates the level of confidence about the subject’s identity for a unique request and if the device used to place the request have proper security posture. The system also evaluates if there are other factors that should be considered and that change the confidence level. Also the access rules are made as granular as possible to enforce those least privileges needed to perform the action in the request.

Image courtesy: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-207.pdf Three terms assume significance in the context of Zero Trust. They are Implicit Trust Zone, Policy Decision Point (PDP) and Policy Enforcement Point (PEP). Implicit Trust Zone represents an area where all the entities are trusted to at least the level of the last PDP/PEP gateway. In other words, the PDP/ PEP engine decides as to whether a request for resource should be allowed access to the Implicit Trust Zone from where it can access the resource. The PDP/ PEP gate is more like an airport security checkpoint. The passengers, once they have been through the security check are granted access to boarding gates where they can wait for the entry to the airplane. They are considered worthy of trust once they are through. The boarding area is thus the Implicit Trust Zone in the analogy. In our case, the idea is to explicitly authenticate and authorize all subjects, assets and workflows that make up the enterprise.

Challenges of Implementing the ZTA

For where there are opportunities, there are challenges. The road to ZTA implementation has its fair share of challenges.

There is no single solution encompassing all the tenets of Zero Trust. A one-size-fits-all approach is off the table for obvious reasons. Many different technologies need to be integrated and often, they are of varying maturity.
Investment in terms of time, resources and technical capabilities. Migration of extant and legacy systems to a Zero Trust environment is not as easy as it sounds.
And finally, there is no such thing as 100% fool-proof security. The ZTA control plane is still susceptible to compromise.

Overcoming ZTA Implementation Challenges

The challenges need a holistic approach to overcoming them.

Getting hold of visibility: The resources within the enterprise and who needs access to the same and when; these queries should be ascertained at a granular level. This exercise must be inclusive of:
1. Identities
2. Permissions
3. Configurations
4. Activities crisscrossing the cloud infrastructure which are about access to networks and resources that are publicly exposed.
Managing risk: Continuous risk assessment exercise across the cloud IT stack including but not limited to:
1. Identity
2. Networks
3. Compute & storage segments
4. Publicly exposed resources if any
5. Third-party risks originating from vendors, clients etc.

Taking care of governance: Agencies concerned must implement least-privilege policies by taking care of workflows, continuous integration and delivery pipelines and stave off misconfigurations. Just-in-time access policies are also a must-have rather than awarding engineers with all-access pass for specific, limited-time projects. Tracking behaviour: Anomalies that may be borne out of compromised identities must be detected and mitigated.

Beinex and the Zero Trust Architecture

Beinex has solid experience in fostering Zero Trust Architecture capabilities amongst clients. Considering the fact that 90+ entities of Beinex are government clients, our Digital Transformation Team is well positioned to implement the paradigm in multiple domains. Contact us to know more about our offerings.

Amazon CloudFront Case Study: How It Transformed the Customer Experience of Zalando, a Prominent E-commerce Platform

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network offered by Amazon Web Services. It securely transfers content such as software, SDKs, and videos to clients with high transfer speeds. It helps to:
• Increase productivity while maintaining user-friendliness
• Cache your content in edge locations to reduce workload
• Provide high security through the "Content Privacy" feature.
• Utilize HTTPS protocols for fast content delivery.
• Support geo-targeting services for delivering content to specific end users.

The Amazon CloudFront solved the performance and scalability issues, providing Zalando's development teams more insight, flexibility, and control. Eventually, the shift set the stage for long-term innovation and large-scale customer happiness.

Amazon CloudFront Case Study: Challenges Faced by Zalando

In the face of rapid expansion, Zalando sought to maximize its offerings. With more than 49 million active users, Zalando links consumers with brands and goods in 25 European regions. Rich media content is integral to Zalando's website and app to enhance the online customer experience. However, the company's image management, transformation, and delivery system have limited visibility and control for developers. All these factors are crucial for sustaining growth and delivering a unique customer experience.

Zalando migrated its media management and delivery system to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by leveraging Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service designed for developer simplicity, security, and high performance. Using CloudFront, Zalando enhanced developer observability, scalability, and online purchasing experiences.

Strengthening Developer Ownership to Promote Development

Due to substantial expansion, Zalando outgrew its prior image management system, which provided its engineering and product teams with few configuration options. Furthermore, few operational insights were available, making it difficult to see how well the service was doing and what improvements could be made. It affected Zalando's capacity to modify and enhance its online stores. Delivering a consistent client experience during high-demand seasonal events was made difficult by the absence of comprehensive reporting regarding image transformation.

To overcome these obstacles and to develop their new media management system, the Zalando team used Amazon CloudFront. Because of its programmability and flexibility, Amazon CloudFront became crucial for scaling operations and keeping up with rising client demand.

Migrating to AWS Edge

Zalando executed its migration quickly and effectively. The company coordinated its migration schedule with AWS's Enterprise Support, Service Specialists, and Service Teams to avoid conflicts with customer campaigns and market events. Small client groups were used in the initial stages of the conversion so that the business could identify any areas for improvement without significantly impacting Zalando customers. During this procedure, Zalando moved more than 20 websites and apps, totaling 26.93 PB of data. CloudFront's peak load has consistently surpassed 100,000 requests per second.

The development team enhanced the image-delivery method using Zalando's prelaunch hands-on access to CloudFront Functions. The team was pleased to receive support on several levels throughout several stages. Regular contact began very early on, while they looked for proofs of concept and sent the code to verify its legitimacy and identify any obstacles.

Zalando started using CloudFront Functions in production in May 2021. Smooth configuration is a significant change with CloudFront Functions. On an operational level and for daily development, it makes it easier to deploy and reliably revert tasks and scale on demand. Zalando swiftly overcame challenges by implementing the new solution across its online domains. Zalando needed to be able to roll back quickly when necessary, making changes before actual downtime could happen. For various use cases, Zalando now employs both Lambda@Edge and CloudFront Functions. Multiple layers of edge computing give developers greater flexibility, visibility, and control while improving the client experience. It enabled Zalando to respond quickly and provide better consumer and business services.

Since the move, Zalando has been attaining cache hit percentages of 99.5 percent, and its new image-delivery system serves almost five billion images daily. They didn't face any challenges with Amazon CloudFront. With about 250 million online orders after the transformation, Zalando's CloudFront solution's size and effectiveness were crucial in providing a first-rate consumer experience.

Additional optimizations made by Zalando have resulted in a threefold decrease in requests for nonoptimized photos on the home screens of the company's online and mobile applications. Because of its improved efficiency and versatility, teams within Zalando have shifted to utilize the pipeline built on CloudFront for additional kinds of material.

Fostering Client Interaction

Using AWS, Zalando intends to keep innovating in managing and manipulating rich media assets. By developing an interactive e-commerce solution with AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video converting service with broadcast-grade features, it intends to promote consumer interaction. To better serve its clients, Zalando moved to CloudFront to enhance the media management and delivery systems that influence the shopping experience. Zalando could carry out a seamless move with the help of the AWS team, which had significant advantages. The business benefits of using Amazon CloudFront are the operational flexibility and the ability to monitor the health of the solution, experiment, and reverse changes quickly.

Summing Up

Zalando's decision to strategically switch to Amazon CloudFront was a watershed moment in its quest to provide a better, more scalable consumer experience. By tackling important issues with media delivery, performance, and developer control, Zalando increased operational efficiency and enhanced the user experience across all platforms. This success story illustrates how intelligent content delivery systems can enhance long-term value, performance, and customer satisfaction in digital commerce as the company grows and changes.