Category: General

Traditional businesses are often weary of moving their business to the cloud. After all, there is a mixed perception about the flexibility, safety and customization offered by cloud services. Every business has a different set of needs and complexities. Following considerations will help you to successfully move your business over cloud servers. 1. Cost-effective scalability On-site ERP systems cost a lot of money in maintenance and expansion. For a growing business, it becomes almost impossible to bear the operational cost. Cloud services are the best solution for growing small-scale businesses. But many businesses are reluctant to shift to cloud because of unawareness, fear of losing business, high turnaround time and effect of migration on their existing system. Depending upon the modules you use and the number of users, you may be required to change the capacity of servers, hardware and software. Most of the cloud service providers allow you to manage the scale of your business. Your existing resources can be scaled up to accommodate increasing requirements of your business. Check with the vendor, the ease of expansion without having to make expensive changes to the system. Choose the service provider who understands your business needs and bends accordingly. 2. Compliance obligations by vendor Off late, serious problems in the IT infrastructure have become talking point in the industry. Sensitive corporate data is being blatantly shared with a third party by service providers. The critical business information is vulnerable to system crashes with poor back-up plan for restoration. The companies end up spending a lot of money on third party security applications without getting expected returns. Clearly discuss the security measures taken up by the vendor and the accountability in case of system failure or data hacking. Assess a series of cloud providers on the basis of their frequency of conducting penetration and vulnerability tests. Evaluate the level of certifications granted to the service provider. Insist upon them to provide unconditional co-operation in complying with your own audits. 3. Effect of server crash Server crash can happen because of various reasons like technical glitches, virus attack, hacking or any other malaise by notorious attackers. In any case, your business data is vulnerable. Discuss the impact of such crashes on the continuity of your business. What is the system turnaround time? Many companies are considering having multiple vendors to lower the risk inflicted upon them by depending upon a single provider. The nitty-gritty of data recovery and back-up plans need to be worked out. You need to also decide what information is stored on the cloud. Critical information can be stored on in-house servers while the rest can be laid upon the cloud. The Amazon cloud server crash three years ago had a catastrophic effect on many companies who permanently lost some of their customers’ data. While many providers assure data back-up, they, usually, back up the data in another system on same location, which is practically of little use. The ultimate data back-up plan is one stored on multiple independent locations in real-time. 4. Security across the enterprise Cloud computing security is a necessity when considering a vendor. A complete audit of the cloud vendor with the help of an IT professional needs to be a part of company’s selection process. Basic security like encrypted data and two-factor authentication are the bare minimum measures to be taken by cloud vendors. Have a thorough assessment of existing and new applications in your organization. This is important to know the possibility of application development in the cloud environment. All cloud-based applications need to be mapped distinctly to know their overall strength to integrate with the cloud. They need to also undergo deep scans to know the level of vulnerability. Understand the risk associated with open-source software as they can have issues like lack of source code; and by using security solutions from cloud vendors, you can mitigate such risk. 5. Alignment with business goals In comparison to on-premise ERP systems, cloud computing helps you to tune your investment in a more value-driven way. On-premise systems involve a certain element of fixed cost, which eats away a significant portion of your IT budget without actually generating value for your business. On the other hand, with cloud, you are able to increase the responsive time of the system to your business. Benefits generated are significantly high as there is little investment required on hardware, software and project implementation. Despite all the benefits listed, you need to find out whether moving to cloud is suitable for your business goals because there are certain threats and compatibility issues related with cloud. There is risk of data breaches, data loss, hijacking, insecure APIs and abuse of cloud services. Furthermore, cloud systems offer a lot of limited flexibility and customization as compared to on-premise system. Is it really going to be suitable for your business? 6. Support on multiple devices The organizations, which plan to migrate to cloud services today look much ahead. You have to make sure that cloud applications are available for different operating platforms like Windows and Mac. It needs to be easily accessible on smart phones, tablets and other internet-connected gadgets. The most common mobile platforms include Android, Windows, iOS and Blackberry interface. Provided your organization follows BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, a multi-device access increases the efficiency of your organization as employees can access the cloud services through the device of their choice. It keeps your services and work active on the go, especially, if you have a significant chunk working as mobile workforce. The usability of cloud services needs to be excellent on various devices accompanied by responsive design and full-feature access. 7. Ability to provide a complete solution An ideal cloud service provider needs to be able to provide you with planning, budgeting and forecasting solution as well. Advanced cloud services like Oracle offer self-service business applications delivered on an integrated development and deployment platform with tools that rapidly extend and create new services. Such solutions allow the business

With businesses striving hard to expand globally, the investment made in time and money should yield maximum returns to sustain that growth & future-proof against loss. The first step towards sustaining that growth is to have coordinated business approach within the organization. There are various challenges facing the IT industry withholding opportunities that can hamper growth if ignored. This article will discuss the top 10 global IT challenges and what you need to do to overcome them. 1. Cyber security Cyber security poses a grave threat to businesses limiting their growth. As business environment complicates with the introduction of new IT mechanisms, the potential of cyber attacks grows proportionately. Business houses need a collaborative participation to tackle this on-going menace. Senior management needs to engage more to understand the security threat at the ground level. Simulated cyber attacks needs to be conducted to deal with potential breaches. Analyze operational data periodically to keep a check. Limit the access to critical business information to key officers only. Use biometric authentication to avoid identity theft. Make customer information security a priority. Appoint chief security officer who works along with chief information officer and other senior executives. 2. Redefine cloud strategy Cloud computing is rigorously expanding with continuous advancement of public and private clouds. The IT executives are facing the challenge of choosing the suitable cloud model that works in line with their application portfolio. There has been rising demand for SaaS integration to have better control over business. SaaS integration helps you to maximize value of your cloud computing investment by ensuring instant data delivery irrespective of data location, thus, improving system efficiency. Organizations need to quickly make their cloud sourcing decisions with help from cloud vendors and consultants. If they are adopting hybrid cloud model, the existing data centers need to be readied to work with hybrid cloud. 3. Data transformation Data center transformation is a major challenge that needs to be addressed on a large scale. It involves transformation at various ends involving people, process and technology. Data transformation manager needs to be capable of evolving from traditional ways of working and understand the scale of technological advancement. Organizations need to be able to convert data to get insights and identify opportunities that allow them to make better decisions. There needs to be a seamless information exchange between applications and processes involved. Techniques like data modeling, data mapping and data migration need to be deployed to consolidate business processes. In a bid to transform data, a practical approach involving cost factor, defining service catalog and the objective of the organization need to be taken into account. 4. Data classification Data classification might sound easy but it pulls out all energy out of organizations if there is no classification scheme in place. There are many challenges involved here that limit the capacity of the organization to successfully implement data classification. There is tremendous amount of data generated in the organization on an on-going basis. Every employee needs to be trained to classify data and training all employees can be expensive. Apart from that, developing a classification scheme also costs significantly. Data classification involves a lot of data merging and eliminating redundancy. Forming a well-defined classification strategy as per regulatory standards is crucial to succeed. Support from senior management is essential to drive this exhaustive process. Only realistic targets need to be set. If the goal looks hard to accomplish, start by classifying networks. 5. Addressing social media issues The problem with social media is that a lot of information is open to public. It helps the marketers to classify and approach their target audience. On the contrary, trading and commercial websites & social media websites are prone to spam, scam and phishing attacks. Most social media users are unsuspecting as it does not involve their bank details. But the attackers are obviously here to steal personal information to misuse it for other purposes. Web developers follow strict security protocol to protect the users’ information but a lot depends upon the awareness level of users. Avoid using social media for personal communication. Feed limited personal information in your profile – Avoid putting your address, family details etc. Limit the access to different sections of your profile through privacy settings. Be careful who you are friend with. Avoid clicking on suspicious links and pop-ups originating from social media websites. 6. Information governance There is abundant digital information generated by organizations on a daily basis. They need to make sure that the information is secure. Information governance will become a mark of responsible business. Business houses will be subjected to litigation, if they are incapable to protect confidential information of their customers. On the other side, the information needs to be readily accessible and be available to authorized party on request. Employee training is necessary to improve governance. While paper-based information has a limited lifespan as organizations prefer to scrap them after a certain period, electronic data is never deleted intentionally. Organizations need to design data retention policies to limit the storage period and ever rising cost of storage. Explore the options of compressed content and new media types. 7. Mobile business intelligence Mobile business intelligence is a new concept, which is catching up fast due to growing mobile workforce. Mobile BI is the ability of the smartphone-enabled employee to gain business insights through information analysis using applications designed for mobile. Organizations are under growing pressure from the customers and the competitive market to deliver efficiently. Mobile workforce can be highly productive, if they can use mobile BI on the move. It will help the employees to make decisions based on real-time information available on mobile and improve customer service. The full-scale adoption of mobile BI still remains a major challenge for many organizations as senior executives lack conviction, perceived business benefits and tangible ROI. 8. Controlling expenses Many organizations, despite having a sound IT budget, are unable to control their expenses. Unexpected cost escalation can happen because of many reasons if there is no check in place. Do not let

The idea behind sharing valuable content is that your potential customers will take you seriously and make repeated visits to your digital marketing platforms to seek more information. This, ultimately, will drive sales and revenue for your company. It helps you to explore individual customer interest and follow their passion. Furthermore, it increases customer engagement by efficiently delivering relevant content to every customer. Understanding the concept of content marketing personalization Content marketing is the ability of the marketers to produce quality content, specifically, focused on target audience. When the same approach is followed in a more personalized manner that comes down to individual level of customers, it is termed as content marketing personalization. Though being very specific becomes tedious when the list of customers is long, marketers are increasingly using advanced tools to break the shackles of limitations. Knowing the customers deeply from the standpoint of their likings, behavior, desires and choices, marketers design content, which would surely be read by the customers. Content marketing personalization is done both for B2B and B2C businesses. Most of the B2B organizations segment their content based on the target audience characteristics like type of industry, profiles of individual decision-makers, company-specific characteristics, stage in buying cycle and personalized content preferences. On the other hand, in B2C marketing, it becomes practically impossible to do a personalized marketing campaign. So, the marketers identify and form a group of key customers, who generate significant business for the company. Key customers also include those who offer critical feedback on your products, help in product innovation, offer key insights in identifying market gaps and endorse your brand. Clearly, marketers need to identify, who these customers are, where they are and why, when & what mode they use to access the content. Knowing all these answers is the starting point of building a content marketing strategy. Following are the initiatives that help you to personalize your content: 1. Understand your customers Understanding the customers is crucial for your content marketing campaign as it helps you to break the ice. A flat marketing approach will lead you nowhere but spam box. There are umpteen ways in which customers make a contact with your organization. While speaking on the phone, listen to them carefully; asking them why they purchased your product will get you closer to them. Empathize with them when they offer a feedback about your product or service. Let them compare your company with the competitors. Do you notice anything incongruous and anachronous about your company? Mend your strategy to offer a more personalized service. Make an effort to call, write or visit them personally to find out more about their needs and expectations. When your business is operating in a B2B setting, your contact could be a CFO, CEO, sales or a production manager. Accordingly, you need to understand their approach and influence they have over the organization before you design the content. 2. Monitor customers’ interest Initially, you might not be sure what your customers like. When you send a newsletter to your subscribers, you try to share information most relevant to them. Do not forget to add a link to your website for more information. Monitor what section of your website attracts them. Are they trying to delve deeper into your research and development initiatives? Are they seeking more information about your product? Keep a track of their movement and you’ll know what intrigues them. This will help you to fine-tune your content. Moreover, you can store this information in your company’s CRM or share it with your company’s marketing manager and sales force to help them in pitching their marketing & sales effort. Imagine, how surprised your customers will get, when you share information they have been desperately seeking. Adding to that, you give them more interesting facts and statistics. That’s the power of content marketing. Your customers will automatically pick up the receiver and give you a call. If not that, they will definitely share their opinion via. a reply e-mail. 3. Do not push too much content You might think that the more content you share with your customers, the more you are educating them or the more you impress them. Unfortunately, pushing too much content becomes counter-productive and you again risk yourself of landing in the spam folder. Think of your customers as busy people who have no time for your e-mails, leave apart junk e-mails. Content marketing can work without anything but quality and valuable content. Keep the frequency of your e-mail weekly or fortnightly or until you have truly significant reason to share. Choose your day carefully as you don’t want your content-rich e-mail go unread sent on a Monday morning. Many marketers start sending e-mails with a hope of getting a quick response from the customers; and when that does not happen, they turn aggressive and start sending off multiple e-mails in a week. Such a strategy proves a disaster and you start losing your customers. So, one thing is for sure, you need a lot of patience initially to pursue content marketing. 4. Proceed step-by-step It is an inveterate practice among marketers to seek personal information about their customers to know them better. For a B2C company, such information might include name, age, sex, marital status, number of children etc. while for a B2B company, it might include company turnover, list of other customers and their quotation or any other trade secret. Though this information looks good from a marketing perspective, if your customers realize that you hold too much information about them, they are likely to take you cautiously. So, make it a point not to use too much personal information while sharing content as it might scare them away altogether. Use a try-and-test method to understand what your customers like. When you pick up something interesting, take it from there gradually. In content marketing, you take your customers as a long-term asset; reduce or nullify your ambitions of short-term gain. 5. Be specific Segregate your content based upon your audience. Share

Almost every successful business makes use of explainer videos and the trend is only set to grow. Yet, many companies that have chosen to use explainer videos have often noticed that they are not getting the results that they want. They may have hired the best explainer video makers and the best animators. Yet, the traffic and the ROI are perhaps quite disappointing. Why do explainer videos sometimes fail? One of the main reasons why explainer videos are not successful is because they do not load fast. You read that right. If you do not ensure that the video loads fast, chances are, even the best explainer video will be ignored by web users. In fact, a recent study revealed that the first two seconds of a video are very crucial to it being viewed properly. If the video takes time to load and does not start within two seconds, many web users simply move on to the next website. In this article, let us take a look at various tips to make sure that your website loads faster, so that your videos load too. And that will ensure that you stay on top of your business all the time. In order to make sure that your audiences do not just close the tab and move on to the next rival, you need to make sure that you take a few steps. We have listed them below: Invest in better hosting: It is a well known fact that many companies opt for hosting plans because the hosting company offers economical packages. But is it really saving you money or causing you losses? If the hosting company is not up to the mark, your page may not load fast enough and the video may not play at once. It may take a few seconds to start. And that is enough to get your audience get bored of you. Make sure that you have a contemporary and up-to-date hosting service that has negligible-none downtime. Test if your website loads fast enough: A number of times, we may notice that though everything is in order, people are simply not staying on the web page for too long. One of the reasons is, your page is not fast enough. Make sure that you test your website’s loading speeds regularly to diagnose any problems that may be happening in the background. There are a number of web add-ons that can help you to check if your website is running fast or not. WebPageTest.org, YSlow! and Google Page Speed are some of the tools that you can use to check your web page’s speed. Do your page elements load: You also need to check if all your other page elements are loading properly. Ideally, make sure that all other page elements load before the video loads. This makes sure that everything is not going to load at once. Browser caching: If you enable browser caching, images that people download when they open your page need not be downloaded again. This reduces the time for the video to load as well. A simple yet effective method to increase the speed of your web page. Seek professional help: If nothing is working and the video still takes a little while, you can always contact web consultants to help you out with faster loading pages. There could be errors in web designing or web development as well. A thorough check-up will make sure that your website is up and running, with all the videos loading fast. Final thoughts As a business owner, you need to be aware that explainer videos are immensely helpful, only if they can be viewed by the audience. What we are really trying to say is, if you do not make your videos load fast enough or you have some technical issues on your website, even the most expensive and the best produced explainer video will not do much. Invest in quality hosting services, learn how to keep your website clean and load fast and seek professional help when you are unable to help yourself. These basic tips and tricks will help you to make sure that your explainer video loads fast.

Explainer videos as we have mentioned several times, are growing in importance and status. All companies that sell products and services should be making explainer videos in order to reach out to people who do not want to read through elaborate textual content. While it is a recent trend to create explainer videos, the technique has existed since a long time. What most people notice is that most explainer videos are animated not filmed actually. You may be wondering why people or companies choose to create animation videos instead of real ones. There are many reasons for this. However, in this article we shall discuss how you must choose between creating an animated explainer video and an actually filmed video. The decision making process maybe a little difficult but it is not impossible. You should just know what you want and what the purpose of creating an explainer video is and you will be able to decide between the two techniques. While it is obvious that creating animated videos is cheaper, one still needs to consider a few aspects before jumping into the bandwagon. Animated videos are cheaper than actual filming To film an actual explainer video, you may have to hire a model. Models are always expensive and you will also need to hire photographers. Photographers are not cheap either. Next, an actual film will need to be sent to the studios for editing and for post production. This process does not only take time but also consumes a lot of financial resources. On the other hand, animated videos are cheaper to create and they also take less time. All that you need is an animation specialist, a script writer and a voiceover artist. It creates the same effect as a regular film but is a lot less cheap and much quicker. With this in mind, we may also consider a situation where actual filming is necessary. If you sell products that are wearable, you may want to hire actual models. Clothes especially cannot be ‘explained’ through explainer videos. One needs to use live models in order to explain viewers how it fits, how it looks and what makes it special. There are other instances too, when you may want to use real life models. If you sell medical gadgets, you will probably have to hire people who play the part of patients and care givers. This helps people to strike a note and attach themselves to the product emotionally. While live models have a greater chance at creating a connection between the viewer and themselves, animated explainer videos have their own advantages. We have already mentioned that they are cheaper and quicker to build. Another advantage is that animation videos are neutral in nature. People usually do not get offended when they watch animated films. Chances are higher that a larger segment of people will watch your video if your explainer video is animated. Understanding the context There are many scenarios when animated explainer videos are better than actual filming. We must remember that actual filming is a lot more difficult and takes a lot of time as well. With this in mind, one must understand that it is not easy to create explainer videos that are actually shot, even though they seem attractive. Explainer videos are cheaper, effective and can be produced quickly. If you are confused about your choice, you could always speak to explainer video professionals who will be able to help you decide which medium you must be adopting. It is never a bad idea to create animated explainer videos because a lot of people prefer videos to textual content. Videos have the ability to go viral and they are also entertaining in nature. Precisely for this reason, videos are preferable to having just textual content. People can also make better decisions about the products they want once they watch videos. Now that animation is so developed, it is possible to create very realistic videos at a fraction of the cost of making real videos. No matter what it is, it is always a good idea to think before choosing between either of the two options. Consider what your goals are and then decide on something that is better for you. Chances are, an animated explainer video will take care of your needs most of the time.

Incredible moment of pride for us! President of India Shri Pranab Mukherjee launched website for National Mission on Libraries developed and designed by Indus Net Technologies: “President Shri Pranab Mukherjee here today launched the National Mission on Libraries (NML), an initiative of the Ministry of Culture to modernise and digitally link public libraries across the country. At a function held at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Shri Mukherjee also formally inaugurated the NML’s guidelines, logo and website in the presence of Culture Minister Smt. Chandresh Kumari Katoch. Secretary Culture Shri Ravindra Singh and other dignitaries were also present at the function. Speaking at the function Shri Pranab Mukherjee said, the creation of a National Virtual Library of India is one of the major component schemes of the National Mission on Libraries. This is truly a step in the right direction. With the aim of equitable and universal access to knowledge resources, the National Virtual Library of India would provide digital resources by digitizing the relevant reading material in different languages, which would be shared at all levels. He said, he is happy to know that the target users of NVLI will not only be students, researchers, doctors and professionals but also the educationally, socially, economically and physically disadvantaged groups. Thus, it would empower people with information in order to create a knowledge society and also ensure preservation of digital content for posterity. Shri Mukherjee said, digital libraries open up the possibility of far more flexible and coherent multimedia collections that are both fully searchable and browsable in multiple dimensions. As each generation becomes more in tune with the Internet, their desire to retrieve information as quickly and easily as possible has increased. Finding information by simply searching the Internet is considered much easier and faster than reading an entire book. He said, he is confident that this initiative of National Mission on Libraries will largely facilitate the internet savvy people in making maximum use of library resources. The President said, the endeavour of the National Mission on Libraries towards setting up of model libraries will set a benchmark for the development of Libraries. He said that these model libraries would be facilitated with subscription of E-Journals/E-Book services through Web VPN Services developed by National Informatics Centre. These would also be provided with reading resources to meet the local needs. It is appreciable that appropriate facilities would be created to meet the needs of Senior Citizens, Specially-abled persons and children. ” Courtesy: Press Information Bureau (pib.nic.in) http://inbministry.blogspot.in/ http://inbministry.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-02-04T13:42:00%2B05:30&max-results=7