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No end in sight for chip shortage as supply chain problems pile up

29th October 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

“We’re not talking about quarters. We’re talking about years.”

Earlier this year, the chip shortage seemed like it might ease sometime in 2022. Now, that forecast appears to have been optimistic.

“The shortages are going to continue indefinitely,” Brandon Kulik, head of Deloitte’s semiconductor industry practice, told Ars. “Maybe that doesn’t mean 10 years, but certainly we’re not talking about quarters. We’re talking about years.”

It is becoming clear that snarls in the semiconductor supply chain are weighing on economic growth. Yesterday, both GM and Ford said that missing chips led to slashed profits for the third quarter, and Apple is rumored to be cutting this year’s production targets for its iPhone lineup, the company’s cash cow. Chip woes have become so widespread that a division of Wells Fargo thinks the pressures will curtail US GDP growth by 0.7 percent.

No easy fix

As with many thorny problems, the causes of the chip shortage are myriad, and none of them has a quick fix.

For one, people keep buying new phones, tablets, and laptops, and they continue to use network-heavy services like video streaming, video conferencing, and more, which increases data-center use. “Demand just keeps continuing to grow in general across nearly all markets,” Kulik said.

That appetite has collided head-on with a variety of supply shortages. Recently, substrates that make up printed circuit boards have become scarce. Compared with advanced semiconductors, PCBs are relatively low-margin and easy to manufacture. Most chip companies don’t make their own, but without PCBs, semiconductors can’t talk to other chips in a computer. The companies that do make the boards don’t make a lot of profit that they can reinvest in expanding production.Advertisement

Making matters worse, a fire at major substrate factory in July 2020 took a significant source offline. As a result, PCB factory capacity is expected to lag demand in the coming years. The crunch has become so acute that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger brought it up on his company’s most recent earnings call.

Even the world’s richest semiconductor manufacturers are swamped, and they’re a long way away from being able to meet demand. New fabs take years to build and optimize, and companies are hesitant to invest if they think surges in demand will be temporary. While demand is up, whether or not it will persist beyond the pandemic is unclear. Companies are loath to invest in a new fab if there’s a strong possibility that it won’t be running 70 percent of the time. Fabs are just too expensive.

“If you’re running at 60 or 70 percent utilization, you’re probably losing money,” Robert Maire, president of Semiconductor Advisors, told Ars.

Leading-edge fabs cost around $5 billion–$10 billion, multiple times what they cost a decade or two ago. As manufacturing techniques have advanced, the buildings themselves get more costly to construct, and the machines that make the chips have grown more expensive. The latest tools use extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is required to produce chips with features smaller than 7 nm, and they sell for upward of $120 million.

New capacity

Despite the eye-watering costs, many manufacturers are incrementally adding capacity with new buildings at existing facilities, Kulik said. Bigger projects are in the works, too. Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have all announced new fabs in recent months. But those won’t come online for years, in part because the facilities need a host of supporting infrastructure, from power plants to fresh water supplies.

New fabs also need to be staffed. “There’s also a talent shortage going on right now,” Kulik said. “It’s not just that we need more manufacturing lines, it’s that we need more people.” Universities, community colleges, and companies are working to boost the number of trained workers, but those efforts will take time to bear fruit.

Numerous other problems have piled on, ranging from factory fires to shipping delays. In March, a fire tore through a fab owned by Renesas Electronics. The Japanese company was a key supplier for the automotive industry, and it was already working overtime to make up for the loss of capacity at Asahi Kasei Microdevices, another automotive supplier, which had a fire in one of its fabs in October 2020.

Shipping delays that have plagued so many other businesses haven’t skipped the semiconductor industry, either. Chips frequently zip around the globe as they go from silicon wafer to final product.Advertisement

Other setbacks have been more temporary but still damaging. The February deep freeze in Texas, which took out half the state’s power generating capacity, set back production at Samsung’s fab in Austin. And this summer, a COVID outbreak in Malaysia forced chip-packaging plants to shut down.

Panic ordering

All of that has contributed to lengthening lead times. At the end of last year, it took 13 weeks for a typical order to be fulfilled; now it’s taking almost 22 weeks. Buyers aren’t helping. Before the pandemic, many had embraced lean manufacturing, a method that calls for companies to hold very little inventory of component parts. But now, as lead times stretch on, companies are placing more orders and holding more inventory in the hope that they won’t get caught without the chips they need.

“I’ve spoken to users of semiconductors who used to do just-in-time manufacturing,” Maire said. “They have gone to stocking literally a year’s worth of parts to counteract any potential shortages.”

As manufacturers add incrementally to existing facilities, Kulik said we could see some shortages easing sooner than others. Such additions typically take between 12–18 months to complete. Entirely new fabs, though, take two to three years, he said. Given today’s long lead times, incremental capacity may not be enough.

“I expect there to be a shortage until a lot of the new capacity comes online,” Kulik said.

Courtesy of: Tim De Chant

Facebook and Google’s new plan? Own the internet

22nd October 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

America’s tech giants already own the online world. Now they want to own the internet’s infrastructure, too

The cloud is not an abstraction. Your photos, uploaded to Google’s cloud, do not float in the ether. Your iCloud backups do not break bread with the gods. The metaverse that Facebook is so keen on building will not exist in the heavens.

The name “cloud” is a linguistic trick – a way of hiding who controls the underlying technology of the internet – and the huge power they wield. Stop to think about it for a moment and the whole notion is bizarre. The cloud is, in fact, a network of cables and servers that cover the world: once the preserve of obscure telecoms firms, it is now, increasingly, owned and controlled by Big Tech – with Google and Facebook claiming a lion’s share.

Building data centre capacity is something of a full-time job for Big Tech. Here, in vast facilities spread across the world, your most private photos and messages sit on a hard drive on an anonymous computer on an anonymous rack, stacked alongside thousands of others in an out-of-town data centre, sited somewhere where energy and land are cheap.

The cloud is a hulking physical network. It forms a part of the internet’s backbone, which itself is overwhelmingly made up of a network of cables intersecting the world’s oceans. It is easy to imagine these as larger or grander than they are – in reality they are generally the width of a hosepipe, buried for a short distance from shore for security, but beyond that point allowed to sit freely on the sea bed.

A conversation with Bruce Neilson-Watts, who spent 16 years as a navigator, engineer and then a captain of boats working to lay and repair the cables, sheds a little more light on what they look like and how they work. The actual part of the cable which carries information across the continent is just the tiniest core of the hosepipe-width cable, with even that tiny thickness able to carry up to 100GBps or even 400GBps on newer cables in the smallest fractions of a second.

Much of the rest of the width is made up of petroleum jelly – yes, the same stuff that comes in a Vaseline jar – intended to protect the cables from water damage and corrosion, meaning even the physical structure of the internet is, in fact, lubed up. Make of that what you will.

The ownership of the data centres – and often as a result, our data – that power the internet is a matter of almost constant public debate. It’s the issue that drives conversations about tech monopolies and the overbearing power of internet platforms. But the same cannot be said of those transatlantic cables, almost 1.5 million kilometres of which now traverse almost every part of the globe.

These operators tend to stay out of sight. In reality, many of the world’s international cables are often owned by consortia of companies, who are often rivals in other contexts. Some major internet cables list as many as 50 owners, while only around a quarter appear to be operated by one company.

These companies charge others for the amount of data they transmit through the cables they own, but also barter access to cables owned by others in exchange for free access to theirs – a quiet share-and-share-alike system behind huge telecoms companies, all behind the scenes.

The world’s biggest owner of cables is a household name, at least to Americans – it’s AT&T, which has a stake in around 230,000 kilometres of international internet cabling, or around one sixth of the total. But looking at others in the top ten reveals why both Big Tech and Western governments are starting to pay the apparently dull issue of cable ownership more attention: in second place is China Telecom, while Chunghwa Telecom (based in Taiwan) is third and China Unicorn is sixth.

In the tenth and eleventh spots, however, are some very familiar names: Facebook and Google. Big Tech is getting into big cables – and doing so in a big way. Over the past few years, 80 percent of investment in new cables has flowed from the two US tech giants. As of today, Facebook owns or co-owns 99,399 kilometres of cables, Google 95,876 kilometres. And more investments are on their way: in August, Facebook and Google announced their plans for building a 12,000 kilometre undersea cable, Apricot, which will link Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia when completed in 2024. For Google, that came hot on the heels of a previous announcement about the Echo subsea cable, which will connect California, Singapore, Guam and Indonesia. For its part, Facebook has thrown its weight behind the coalition of telcos building what might turn out to be the longest subsea cable ever: 2Africa, a 45,000 kilometre-long cord planned to encompass the whole African continent and connect 33 countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle-East by 2024. In May 2020 Bloomberg reported that the project will cost under $1 billion – but that was before Facebook announced several expansions to the initial design.

The stated motivations for these efforts vary. Facebook especially frames part of its effort as being about improving internet access across the world – while admitting some advantage to itself through user growth if this succeeds. Google mostly highlights how greater connectivity will boost local economic prosperity.

Many internet cables follow the telecoms routes laid out in the early twentieth century, and so efforts to build huge new cables serving non-western countries (like, in a way, the 2Africa cable) are framed as an effort to decolonise the internet, albeit an uncomfortable one given the mix of companies and groups involved.

The tech giants have privacy and security reasons to get into cables, too. In 2013, when The Guardian and The Washington Post published revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the story that most angered American tech firms (especially Google) was about how the agency was intercepting traffic sent internally between their data centres.

Google’s response to this was both to ratchet up its use of encryption, even for traffic travelling internally (which can still mean across continents), and to increase its reliance on entirely private fibre-optic cables for such communications. And when you think like Google and the other tech giants, once you’re in the cable game, you might as well get in properly.

Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the USA’s Federal Communications Commission under president Obama – and self-avowed former lobbyist for the cable industry – says that Big Tech’s foray into cable-laying has also affected cable companies’ thinking. “The networks themselves are wildly jealous of, and therefore, are trying to assimilate into [Big Tech],” he says. Seeing Big Tech take a huge slice of the profit from the internet as platforms, many cable companies want to be platforms too, he explains. “Why did AT&T buy DirecTV? Why did they buy Time Warner, et cetera? They want to get into these platform activities.”

Where cable companies are realising they are missing out on power by missing out on being platforms, Big Tech platforms are making the opposite realisation: unless they have some sway in distribution, their power will be limited. And the Big Tech companies seem to be managing to buy up stakes in the internet’s backbone much more competently and quietly than their cable counterparts have managed the reverse (just think of the unhappy, short-lived takeover of AOL by Verizon.)

The list of stakeholders in the internet backbone shows who is trying to seize outright control of the internet. And, once again, it looks like the usual suspects have the tightest grip.

Courtesy of: James Ball

NASA Turns to the Cloud for Help With Next-Generation Earth Missions

15th October 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

As satellites collect larger and larger amounts of data, engineers and researchers are implementing solutions to manage these huge increases.

The cutting-edge Earth science satellites launching in the next couple of years will give more detailed views of our planet than ever before. We’ll be able to track small-scale ocean features like coastal currents that move nutrients vital to marine food webs, monitor how much fresh water flows through lakes and rivers, and spot movement in Earth’s surface of less than half an inch (a centimeter). But these satellites will also produce a deluge of data that has engineers and scientists setting up systems in the cloud capable of processing, storing, and analyzing all of that digital information.

“About five or six years ago, there was a realization that future Earth missions were going to be generating a huge volume of data and that the systems we were using would become inadequate very quickly,” said Suresh Vannan, manager of the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The center is one of several under NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems program responsible for processing, archiving, documenting, and distributing data from the agency’s Earth-observing satellites and field projects. The program has been working for several years on a solution to the information-volume challenge by moving its data and data-handling systems from local servers to the cloud – software and computing services that run on the internet instead of locally on someone’s machine.

The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, part of the U.S.-European Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission, is the first NASA satellite to utilize this cloud system, although the amount of data the spacecraft sends back isn’t as large as the data many future satellites will return.

Part of the NISAR satellite rests in a thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in August 2020. The Earth satellite will track subtle changes in the planet’s surface as small as 0.4 inches. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Two of those forthcoming missions, SWOT and NISAR, will together produce roughly 100 terabytes of data a day. One terabyte is about 1,000 gigabytes – enough digital storage for approximately 250 feature-length movies. SWOT, short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography, will produce about 20 terabytes of science data a day while the NISAR (NASA-Indian Space Research Organisation Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission will generate roughly 80 terabytes daily. Data from SWOT will be archived with the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center while data from NISAR will be handled by the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center. NASA’s current Earth science data archive is around 40 petabyes (1 petabyte is 1,000 terabytes), but by 2025 – a couple of years after SWOT and NISAR are launched – the archive is expected to hold more than 245 petabytes of data.

Both NISAR and SWOT will use radar-based instruments to gather information. Targeting a 2023 launch, NISAR will monitor the planet’s surface, collecting data on environmental characteristics including shifts in the land associated with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, changes to Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers, and fluctuations in agricultural activities, wetlands, and the size of forests.

Set for a 2022 launch, SWOT will monitor the height of the planet’s surface water, both ocean and freshwater, and will help researchers compile the first survey of the world’s fresh water and small-scale ocean currents. SWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatial.

“This is a new era for Earth observation missions, and the huge amount of data they will generate requires a new era for data handling,” said Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “NASA is not just working across the agency to facilitate efficient access to a common cloud infrastructure, we’re also training the science community to access, analyze, and use that data.”

Faster Downloads

Currently, Earth science satellites send data back to ground stations where engineers turn the raw information from ones and zeroes into measurements that people can use and understand. Processing the raw data increases the file size, but for older missions that send back relatively smaller amounts of information, this isn’t a huge problem. The measurements are then sent to a data archive that keeps the information on servers. In general, when a researcher wants to use a dataset, they log on to a website, download the data they want, and then work with it on their machine.

However, with missions like SWOT and NISAR, that won’t be feasible for most scientists. If someone wanted to download a day’s worth of information from SWOT onto their computer, they’d need 20 laptops, each capable of storing a terabyte of data. If a researcher wanted to download four days’ worth of data from NISAR, it would take about a year to perform on an average home internet connection. Working with data stored in the cloud means scientists won’t have to buy huge hard drives to download the data or wait months as numerous large files download to their system. “Processing and storing high volumes of data in the cloud will enable a cost-effective, efficient approach to the study of big-data problems,” said Lee-Lueng Fu, JPL project scientist for SWOT.

Infrastructure limitations won’t be as much of a concern, either, since organizations won’t have to pay to store mind-boggling amounts of data or maintain the physical space for all those hard drives. “We just don’t have the additional physical server space at JPL with enough capacity and flexibility to support both NISAR and SWOT,” said Hook Hua, a JPL science data systems architect for both missions.

NASA engineers have already taken advantage of this aspect of cloud computing for a proof-of-concept product using data from Sentinel-1. The satellite is an ESA (European Space Agency) mission that also looks at changes to Earth’s surface, although it uses a different type of radar instrument than the ones NISAR will use. Working with Sentinel-1 data in the cloud, engineers produced a colorized map showing the change in Earth’s surface from more vegetated areas to deserts. “It took a week of constant computing in the cloud, using the equivalent of thousands of machines,” said Paul Rosen, JPL project scientist for NISAR. “If you tried to do this outside the cloud, you’d have had to buy all those thousands of machines.”

Cloud computing won’t replace all of the ways in which researchers work with science datasets, but at least for Earth science, it’s certainly gaining ground, said Alex Gardner, a NISAR science team member at JPL who studies glaciers and sea level rise. He envisions that most of his analyses will happen elsewhere in the near future instead of on his laptop or personal server. “I fully expect in five to 10 years, I won’t have much of a hard drive on my computer and I will be exploring the new firehose of data in the cloud,” he said.

Courtesy of: JPL NASA

10 Power BI mistakes to avoid

8th October 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

Power BI is increasingly bringing the power of data to business users, but you may need more guardrails to get the most value from it. These are the most common things organizations get wrong.

As a leading business intelligence tool, Power BI offers business users power and flexibility in dealing with data. The Microsoft tool provides everything from Excel integration to enterprise reporting and an increasing number of AI features that simplify getting deeper insights. In fact, the latest Forrester Wave report on augmented BI goes as far as to say “it is hard not to consider Power BI as your top choice for an enterprise BI platform.”

But with so much power and so many features, you need to understand how to work with Power BI to get the most out of it. These are some common mistakes enterprises make with Power BI and how to avoid them.

Going wild with Power BI

Much like Excel, the power of Power BI gives it grass roots popularity. There’s probably already more usage in your organization than you know about. Just leaving people to find out how to get the best from Power BI on their own means they may not make the most of it. Even worse, you can end up with so much data that’s been uploaded (and duplicated by different people) and so many data artefacts that have been created that no one knows who’s doing what and where the useful reports are.

Instead, curate and endorse trusted data sets to make it easy for people to find quality data. Provide training and consider building a center of excellence that includes BI architects, data experts, and people who can help business users be effective with Power BI. You may even want to restrict them from publishing data until they’ve had some training to help get the value without the chaos.

Forgetting data security

The most valuable data in your organization might be confidential, and its usage likely needs to be audited. Turn on integration with Microsoft Information Protection so that you can manage and track data usage and control how it’s used even if it gets exported from Power BI to Excel.

Being too restrictive

The real key to successful Power BI adoption is getting the right balance between empowering users and effective governance. One sure way to fail is to lock down usage to only a few business analysts or data scientists who will look at the data and issue official guidance. You probably can’t hire enough of those experts, and far more people in your organization likely have the data literacy to find valuable insights with Power BI that allow them to react to the changing environment based on data rather than hunches.

Don’t try to control Power BI usage so tightly that you get in their way, but do help them get the best experience with training and good examples.

Ignoring performance

When you think about the value of business intelligence it’s easy to focus on the intelligence — the insights you can get from quality data with the right questions — and the business — the fact that executives will use the tools and act on the insights. But you also need to make sure the basics are right: Unless reports load quickly and interactive visuals are fast, people just won’t use it.

According to Microsoft, successful Power BI adoptions correlate very strongly with good report performance — and not paying attention to performance is the top reason business intelligence projects fail.

Use the Query Diagnostics and Performance Analyzer tools in Power BI Desktop to understand and improve how queries and reports run (SQL Server Profiler can also be useful for finding out which queries cause bottlenecks). You can use Azure Log Analytics with Power BI Premium to dig into your telemetry. Start with the built-in Usage Metrics report to see what reports are popular and make sure they’re well optimized. For large organizations, Microsoft will warn you (in an anonymized report) if Power BI is getting low satisfaction scores from users, suggest which reports are causing problems and, for the largest customers, provide free consultation to help you optimize those reports.

Over-relying on visuals

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the cliché goes, and what Power BI does well is show you a picture that reveals what’s going on inside your data. But not every picture is a useful picture; too many charts and visualizations can produce visual clutter where you don’t notice the most important measures. They also generate a lot of queries that can slow down report performance. Find the right visuals for each report that focus on what’s really important, or use AI visuals such as Key Influencers that try to automatically identify the most significant data.

Failing to make the most of mobile

Not everyone who will find Power BI useful sits at a desk and avoiding overcrowded reports is particularly important when the insights help frontline workers. The Power BI Mobile app is helpful here, as are embedding reports into Power Apps or setting up OKR boards and scorecards with notifications for specific goals that employees will see wherever they are.

In the future, the mobile app will use spatial anchors to bring data and reports to the physical space where the data is actually generated, with an AR view that pins reports to physical objects. That could involve seeing usage state for exercise equipment in a gym, sales figures for the products on a supermarket shelf, throughput and other statistics for machinery on a factory floor, or cars at a dealership: anything where having the right data immediately visible could help you make the best decision.

Overlooking DAX — or its performance

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) are powerful functions that enable you to use complex filters, conditional logic, and aggregations for more advanced analysis. Poorly written DAX functions can also slow down reports and use up capacity. Use the Power BI Performance Analyzer to find DAX measures that need improvement, and make sure you have resources and training to help users understand how to use DAX well.

Assuming your back-end system can handle DirectQuery

Not having to replicate data into Power BI to work with it can be very convenient, but you need to verify that your back-end system can handle the load. Microsoft suggests that the response needs to be less than 5 seconds for a typical aggregate query, but remember to multiply that by the number of visuals in reports. If there are 10 or 20 visuals, loading that report will generate 10 or 20 queries, which means users will be waiting for one or two minutes just for the report to load.

Not using incremental updates and aggregations

Loading data into Power BI to take advantage of the high-performance query engine is very straightforward, with connection packs from a wide range of data sources and a gateway for on-premises data. It’s so easy that users will frequently reload all the data every day to make sure they’re up to date — but there’s no need to reload old data that hasn’t changed.

You can speed up refreshes by using incremental updates that only load the data that’s changed; this will also reduce load on the back-end system. For DirectQuery, enable aggregations that automatically preload and aggregate data in a cache to speed up reports and reduce the load on the external system you’re querying.

Not building a data culture

The most successful Power BI adoptions bring data tools to a wide range of employees, not just people whose job is working with data. But that means making it second nature for your business users to rely on data as a way of making decisions.

For this to happen, you have to develop a data culture where, CTO of Microsoft Analytics Amir Netz suggests, “every conversation starts with what does the data say, every suggestion includes what does the data support. Move from what you think and who you know to what you know and what the facts are saying and it makes a huge difference. A data culture moves from operating on hunches and who speaks louder or who has more power to being an objective organization that is constantly looking at and measuring itself, and constantly optimising to get better results.”

Courtesy of: Mary Branscombe

What is Kyndryl? IBM’s managed infrastructure services spin-off explained

1st October 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

IBM is focusing on hot technologies such as artificial intelligence and the cloud, and is cutting adrift legacy IT activities to operate as an independent company.

Kyndryl is the new name for IBM’s managed infrastructure services business, which will spin off as a separate company by the end of 2021. Initially, little will change for customers — except perhaps the logo on their invoice — but in time Kyndryl’s split from IBM will allow both businesses to innovate and to work with new partners.

What does Kyndryl do?

Essentially, Kyndryl does exactly what the managed infrastructure services unit of IBM’s Global Technology Services segment did: outsource the management of enterprises’ IT infrastructure, whether it came from IBM or another vendor.

Kyndryl is organizing itself into six global managed services practices, and a customer advisory practice that will combine managed services, advisory services, and implantation. The six global practices will each manage a different aspect of technology:

Applications, data and AI
Cloud
Core enterprise and zCloud, IBM’s mainframe-as-a-service offering
Digital workplace
Network and edge
Security and resiliency

What does Kyndryl mean?

Kyndryl claims its name is derived from the words “kinship” and “tendril.” It is meant to evoke new growth and working together, and definitely not to hint at some kind of medication or a character in an online fantasy role-playing game.

What does Kyndryl’s split mean for IBM?

IBM will still be one of the biggest technology businesses in the world. Post-split, its largest operating segment will be Cloud and Cognitive Software, which brought in $23 billion in revenue in 2020, followed by Global Business Services, its consulting unit, at $16 billion. Global Technology Services, the segment from which Kyndryl is being spun out, will shrink to around $7 billion in revenue derived from the remaining Technology Support Services business unit.

How big is Kyndryl?

Kyndryl may be a little short in the vowel department, but it starts life with 4,600 customers (including 75 of the Fortune 100), over a quarter of IBM’s 350,000 staff, activities generating $19 billion in annual revenue and an order backlog (aka long-term maintenance contracts from all those customers) of around $62 billion. Where that puts it in the rankings depends on what you’re measuring. IBM says Kyndryl will be the largest managed infrastructure services provider, twice the size of any other, but IT channel publication CRN says Kyndryl will be only the fifth-largest solutions provider, behind Accenture, what’s left of IBM, DXC Technology, and Tata Consulting Services.

Is Kyndryl hiring?

Like crazy! Although it inherited around 90,000 IBM staff, Kyndryl hired over a dozen top executives in 2021, and has 1,509 lower-level job openings posted at time of writing, more than 300 of them in the US, with other significant concentrations in Hungary, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Costa Rica. Half the openings are for technical specialists, with more than 100 openings in each of systems architecture and sales.

Who works at Kyndryl?

Most staff at Kyndryl are simply changing email addresses, carrying on doing the same work for clients as they did at IBM before the split. Indeed, Kyndryl has gone out of its way to reassure customers that their key points of contact and support, and the other team members they work with, will not change — and that the company will even continue to work with experts in other divisions of IBM as it did before.

But the company is bringing in new blood for many of the most senior roles, either hiring in from other companies, or poaching from other divisions of IBM.

CEO Martin Schroeter is ex-IBM: He left the company in June 2020, before the spin-off was announced, and came back to lead Kyndryl, then known as NewCo, in January 2021. He was previously senior vice president of global markets at IBM, and before that its CFO.

The next senior appointments, in March, were Group President Elly Keinan, another former IBMer who took time out to work in venture capital after 33 years at the company, and Chief Marketing Officer Maria Bartolome Winans, who came to the spin-off directly from her role as CMO for IBM Americas.

Global Head of Corporate Affairs Una Pulizzi was a new hire in April, previously in a similar role at GE, while General Counsel Edward Sebold was chief legal officer for IBM’s Watson Health division.

Early May 2021 saw the poaching of more senior IBMers. Chief Transformation Officer Nelly Akoth was previously with IBM Global Business Services; Leigh Price moved from one leadership role in strategy and corporate development to another; and Vineet Khurana became controller at Kyndryl after five years in three different CFO roles at IBM.

It wasn’t until the second half of May that Kyndryl began to name its top technical staff:

CIO Michael Bradshaw is new to IBM, having previously served as CIO at NBC/Universal and as CIO for Mission Systems and Training at Lockheed Martin.

CTO Antoine Shagoury is a former CIO of US bank State Street and of stock exchanges in London and the US. Most recently, he worked at strategic advisory partnership Ridge-Lane.

Other senior Kyndryl hires from outside IBM include:

Vic Bhagat, a former CIO for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, EMC, and several units of GE, as the head of its customer advisory practice
Chief Human Resources Officer Maryjo Charbonnier, formerly with Wolters Kluwer
CFO David Wyshner, who previously headed up finance at XPO Logistics, a supply chain management outsourcer, and before that helped Wyndham Worldwide split into separate companies
COO Harsh Chugh, most recently CFO at SaaS provider PlanSource

What’s next for IBM?

Customer needs for application services and infrastructure services are diverging, and so spinning off Kyndryl will allow IBM to focus on growing its open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in October 2020. The split turns IBM from a services-led company to one making more than half its revenue from software and solutions.

But until that growth takes hold, Kyndryl and IBM will remain close, as they will begin their separate lives as one another’s largest customers.

Courtesy of: Peter Sayer

Analyst: iPhone 13 may be a satellite phone

10th September 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

If the latest speculation from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is true, it means you could make calls from the mountain or do video chats while at sea — though it may just be an emergency system

When it comes to the future of Apple, it may be significant that reports this weekend claim CEO Tim Cook is now searching for a successor. But for the immediate future of your business, it may be even more important to learn that the iPhone 13 may support satellite communications.

An unexpected Apple moon shot?

We’ve heard whispers Apple may be reaching for the stars. We know the company is working with others to develop 6G, and that part of that standard includes the capacity to broadcast data at high rates across very, very long distances. But the latest report from the uncannily accurate pen of analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is that he expects Apple’s next generation iPhone 13 will feature a low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communication mode, thanks to a Qualcomm X60 baseband modem chip.

In theory, this would let iPhone 13 users send messages and make calls using satellite networks. Kuo also speculates that LEO may be used in Apple’s AR headset, the Apple Car, and other connected accessories. But we don’t know how these features will be deployed, or even whether they will be.

We can speculate that this could mean free Messages to other iPhone users on a global basis; it could become an additional iCloud+ service offering enhanced communication for international users that sidesteps the insecurity of local networks; and it could simply require a subscription to a satellite communication provider.

If the latter, informed speculation suggests Globalstar as the most likely satellite operator to cooperate with Apple on the plan. Globalstar offers a range of devices and coverage plans, but as a guide it currently charges $200/month for its Orbit Unlimited plan, which promises unlimited voice calls. There are other operators using LEO, including Starling, Hughesnet, OneWeb, and more recently, Immarsat, but we don’t know if any of these are supported. We do know that Globalstar stock has climbed 50% on the strength of these claims.

(Update: Since this speculation emerged, new reports confirmed the plan, but warned it may not be put into effect until 2022. And it may be a limited implementation that lets users send messages to emergency services when no cellular coverage is available. It may also boast a system to flag up emergency situations.)

So, who might this be for?

A glance at the status of global mobile broadband and network coverage shows many regions on a national and international basis that are not yet switched on for access. This has prompted all kinds of solutions, including use of satellite “hubs” to provide access to some remote areas.

On a more generic basis, there are multiple industries working in remote areas of the US that require robust connectivity but lack access to cellular. Satellite can fill this gap, particularly at sea, where maritime connectivity is a big business. Use of satellite is also potentially valuable to enterprises seeking solutions for ultra-private communications off the public grid.

While these services do support data, it does seem unlikely you’ll be using these connections to download the latest Ted Lasso episode, though some might take a little pleasure in watching the friendly football coach while on a cargo vessel in the Atlantic Ocean.

We can’t know that Apple plans any of this. But in the event the company were to introduce satellite comms in iPhones, there would be plenty of existing markets that might want to explore the technology; the cost of doing so will inevitably limit adoption, however. There aren’t too many consumers willing to spent $2,400 a year just so they can send unlimited messages to their mates when in areas of poor mobile reception.

At least, not yet.

If Kuo is correct, then it seems Apple’s top brass is quite confident in these plans. He states teams have been researching this for “some time” and are “optimistic.” We’ve heard enough subdued rumors to confirm interest over the last few years.

This is bound to interest enterprises seeking to deploy satellite communications across their international teams. But Kuo’s other claim is that one reason for the move is to help Apple develop “innovative user experiences that can be integrated with new products.”

After all, in the event iPhones become internationally connected on a global basis, then they become bridges to support IoT deployments on a global scale. Cars and AR glasses might be the icing on the cake, but the potential is for Apple to leverage this connectivity to underpin development (or even acquisition) of a global satellite data and communications network.

Apple is expected to introduce iPhone 13 in mid-September, possibly on September 17 for release a week later.

Courtesy of: Jonny Evans

Top 4 Technology Trends Taking Over

3rd September 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

Over the last decade, there have been some unexpected technological advances as the world shifted to accommodate these changes. Whether these innovations are here for the long haul or not, many experts agree these are the technology trends from 2021 that are sure to stick around.

The Rise of the Digital Workplace

The digital workplace is likely the most prevalent technology trend to become commonplace over the last 24 months. By the end of June 2020, 42% of the American workforce was working from home full-time, and the demand for collaboration and communication software soared, with revenue for video conferencing platforms alone more than doubling.

Most employees seem to find working from home convenient and more productive. Plus, employers enjoy benefits like lower office rental and overhead costs. Many tech giants like Facebook and Twitter are jumping on the WFH (work from home) trend and realizing its benefits, announcing plans to establish a permanent WFH culture in the future. Employees working from home have also cited that they would be happy for a more permanent arrangement in the future. Especially as technology improves the prospects of creating a full-sense virtual presence at work while located anywhere in the world.

By the looks of things, employees may be able to enjoy a more virtual presence at the workplace without leaving the comfort of their home, adding an element of socialization and collaboration often lacking when working remotely. Experts agree that this is the future of the workplace and the traditional 9-5 office-based business model is indeed a thing of the past.

Online Learning and Training

Working from home comes with its own limitations, and some Americans will need to consider the impact it can have on mental and physical health. On the positive side, online learning and training opportunities have become commonplace. In addition to video conferencing tools, online learning is boosted by services like language learning applications, online tutoring services, and e-learning software, which have seen increased demand.

With the help of technology, educational resources continue to improve, allowing us access to extensive training resources at any time. With extra time on our hands, many people are opting to expand their knowledge and upskill to improve their chances of employment in the future. While online learning has always been available, solitary learning or virtual group training is becoming the norm.

A Free and Contactless World

The rise of the internet has allowed the world to change drastically, from how we shop to the way we share and gather information and entertain ourselves. We stream movies and TV shows, shop and bank online, and gather information in the form of news, opinion pieces. For example, players within the casino industry are reliant on online reviews. Players will usually seek free slots to test out new titles without paying anything. Something like this is needed in an industry where you have 10,000 slots available. Along with this, we can easily access all the latest, unbiased reviews and information sources from the comfort of our homes. These reviews provide us with all the information we need to make informed decisions when online, all written by industry experts with a wide knowledge base on any particular subject. Indeed, information is at our fingertips.

We can also connect with friends, family, and strangers via social media platforms. We even have the option to earn lucrative careers through platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube without the need to spend thousands of dollars on college fees, despite Florida’s tuition fees being lower than the national average.

Contactless technology is redefining the customer experience and will continue to do so in the future, including touch-free payments and biometric check-ins for accommodation and travel. In the US, touchless check-out features are prevalent and preferred among 90% of shoppers. In terms of security, high-tech facial recognition security systems are adding more peace of mind and improving security around the world.

Contactless technology is not only improving convenience but safety and security as well, all of which will continue to be refined in the coming years. And while contactless tech is primarily used in the retail and travel industries, the advancement of technology means it could completely change the way we live, work, learn, and interact with each other.

AI Technology Continues to Evolve

Machine learning has gotten a lot of attention in recent times and will continue to be a hot topic of conversation in the world of AI. The truth is that AI is becoming more powerful and will likely change our media consumption and even jobs in the future. Many American businesses finding ways to understand machine learning and implement it into their daily operations. In 2020, the University of Florida announced a massive $70 million AI partnership with NVIDIA to strengthen its AI research and training.

These days, popular AI tools like Google’s search engine and Apple’s Siri are prevalent and have become part of our everyday lives. Additionally, machines are learning how to master simple and complex tasks like operating self-drive cars, spotting tumors, and monitoring crops to creating AI-generated content.

The goal is to make human beings’ lives easier and collaborate with AI technology instead of taking over the role completely. The debate on whether the future of content is human or machine continues to be a heated one. As technology improves, AI-generated content will surely become more and more prevalent.

Courtesy of: Jonathan C. with Blexr Limited

How the cyber security market is evolving

27th August 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

The cyber security market has gained even greater importance in the post-Covid era and continues to grow and evolve. But what factors are driving trends in that market and what should your organisation consider when making cyber security investments?

The cyber security market continues to evolve and grow, driven by the increasing reliance of business on information technology, the growing number of security and data protection regulations, the shift of crime online as criminals seek to make money from stealing information and committing fraud, and the increasing incidence of state-sponsored cyber attacks for a variety of reasons, including industrial espionage and the disruption of critical infrastructure.

Cyber criminals continue to professionalise operations and develop new ways of exploiting vulnerabilities in IT. Cyber criminals are focusing particularly on new and emerging technologies that organisations are adopting as they embrace digital transformation to cut costs, improve performance and support new business models and revenue sources to remain competitive.

In line with this trend, organisations are moving to the cloud and adopting a cloud-first policy for all new projects. As a result, more IT environments are becoming hybrid in nature and there is a proliferation of services and data within organisations. These changes in IT environments, together with the fact that more people are working from home in the post-Covid era, are all contributing to expanding the enterprise attack surface, making them increasingly vulnerable to attack because there is more for defenders to protect.

Cyber criminals also continue to exploit insiders to facilitate attacks using social engineering and other methods of manipulation or coercion.

As a result, cyber security has never been more challenging or important to business survival in terms of ensuring continued business operations, protecting against intellectual property loss, ensuring regulatory compliance, and protecting against the cost and loss of reputational damage associated with data breaches.

This makes the cyber security market relevant to businesses of all sizes in every industry sector. Analysis of this market and its evolution reveals several trends in cyber security technologies, products and tools.

Drivers of change

In terms of market trends for major cyber security technologies, the biggest single driver of change will be the move to the cloud by organisations seeking to benefit from the flexibility, speed and potential cost savings of this IT deployment model.

Other key market drivers include automation, machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, DevOps and DevSecOps, the shift to modern architectures using microservices and containers, and an increasing focus by businesses on cyber security and cyber risk mitigation.

Central, established cyber security technologies that are core to modern, forward-looking cyber security programmes are expected to grow and evolve as they continue to fulfil leading roles in cyber defence.

These established technologies include identity-related solutions, data access governance, endpoint protection, detection and response (EPDR), unified endpoint management (UEM), fraud reduction intelligence platforms, application programming interface (API) management and security solutions, database and big data security, and data leakage prevention (DLP).

In addition to these established technologies, there are emerging technologies and trends that are seeing rapid development and adoption and are therefore well on their way to becoming central to cyber security. These are technologies and trends that forward-looking organisations should be adopting, planning to adopt or at least have on their radar to ensure that their cyber defence strategy and capabilities remain up to date.

These emerging technologies include network detection and response (NDR), extended detection and response (XDR), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), secure information-sharing, security for business applications, cloud-delivered security, security operations centre- as-a-service (SOCaaS) and DevOps security.

Organisational trends

As a result of changes in approaches to cyber security in response to changes in the threat landscape, in IT technologies and in the way businesses operate, two main organisational trends have emerged.

The first is the heightened role of the chief information security officer (CISO) and the second is closer alignment and integration between business continuity and cyber security teams.

Many of the trends within the cyber security market are in response to trends that are affecting the market. These include the Covid-19 pandemic, the shift to the cloud, increased home working, the adoption of a zero-trust approach to security, the maturation of machine learning and other AI technologies, and an increasing public demand for decentralised identity to give individuals more control over their personal data.

Other important areas of focus include cyber security competency building, supply chain cyber security, and identity-defined security.

The move to the cloud is perhaps the most significant. The adoption of cloud-based services has been accelerated by the pandemic and the increased need to support employees working from home.

As a key element of digital transformation, the adoption of cloud computing has impacted just about every IT market segment, including security due to introduction of new challenges around protecting hybrid cloud and on-premise business IT environments.

Non-technological trends

Finally, there are several non-technological trends around cyber security. These include a growing focus on developing cyber security skills within organisations, on securing supply chains to ensure business continuity and blocking cyber attacks through supply chain weaknesses, on expanding and raising the status of the role of the CISO, and on the benefits of restructuring operations to ensure greater alignment between the cyber security and business continuity teams to ensure continuity-focused technology investment, a shift to DevSecOps, and a greater focus on threat detection and response capabilities in the face of cyber attacks directly or indirectly by nation states or other adversaries with a similar level of technical capability.

All of these factors are driving the cyber security market, with cyber security offerings that support digital transformation, including cloud and mobile, detection and response capabilities, DevOps environments, and SOAR capabilities likely to see the greatest investment and growth.

What this means for business

Because business is not only dependent on IT to carry out day-to-day operations, but is constantly adopting new technologies to cut costs and to improve productivity and efficiency to gain a competitive edge, cyber security and the use of IT are inextricably linked.

Therefore, both end-user organisations and the IT industry, including cyber security suppliers, once and for all need to shift their perspectives to consider cyber security first and foremost as a business enabler. Business needs IT, but IT without security is worthless because the risk to business is too great. The challenge is to implement the necessary controls and safeguards in the most frictionless way possible, so that security never impedes business processes and initiatives.

This means that end-user organisations need to consider cyber security as a key factor in their technology investment decisions and technology suppliers need to build their products in such a way that they can be used safely by businesses and other organisations.

This dependence on IT means that the cyber security industry, like the rest of the IT market, will be among the industry sectors to be least affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, the cyber security industry is likely to benefit from organisations’ increased need to secure remote and mobile workforces as well secure cloud and hybrid IT environments due to increased adoption of cloud-based services.

Recommendations

Cyber security is one of the areas where virtually every business will need to invest because of ever-growing cyber risks and ever-tightening regulations. When considering the cyber security market in terms of future investments, it is recommended that organisations:

Understand what technologies and capabilities are relevant to cyber security, how they fit in, and their functions.
Map current security capabilities and identify the gaps that need to be filled.
Adopt a strategic approach to cyber security to support business objectives to meet current and future security needs in a consistent way.
Understand the business risks of cyber attacks such as system outages, data breaches and reputational loss, and prioritise those risks that need to be addressed based on their potential impact on the business.
Re-evaluate existing security tools to identify gaps, which tools mitigate the real risks to the business, and which tools can be eliminated because they no longer serve any real purpose.
Assume that breaches will happen to your organisation, and extend your focus from prevention and protection to detection, response and, most importantly, recovery to restore critical systems as quickly as possible.
Adopt a zero-trust approach to security and implement several forms of authentication to ensure continuous identity verification to stop credential abuse and lateral movement by attackers.
Evaluate AI-enhanced tools for decision support, cyber threat intelligence, anomaly detection, threat analysis and automated responses to help address skills shortages by augmenting teams and improving efficiencies.
Ensure you have the tools to analyse incidents to identify any gaps or vulnerabilities that can be addressed to continually improve your cyber defence posture.
Prioritise investments in security intelligence platforms, IAM, user behaviour analytics, security for DevOps, AI-assisted tools, security for OT and internet-of-things (IoT) environments, and integration of cyber security with business continuity management.

Courtesy of: Warwick Ashford

The 9 hottest jobs in IT

20th August 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

From machine learning engineer to multi-cloud integrator, these emerging and resurging IT roles may be your best path forward in the years to come.

ob candidates for the most in-demand IT positions are hard to land in 2021, and that’s likely to continue: Postings for open IT jobs are at their highest level since 2019, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Software and application developers, IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects, IT project managers and systems analysts are among the positions in highest demand,” reports the CTIA. And jobs related to emerging technologies and skills accounted for about 28% of open IT positions, the trade group reported.

We reached out to recruiters, executives, and tech pros, asking them to weigh in on the best opportunities they see in the year ahead. If you’re burning out on your current gig, or feel that your role may be heading toward a dead end, consider some of these roles that offer security and steady growth for the foreseeable future.

Programming — regardless of IT role

Jason Johnson, CIO for Sweetwater, says he’s seeing more roles currently requiring software development skill regardless of the primary job descriptions. That includes “data scientists, web developers, network engineers, computer programmers, database administrators, and many more titles,” Johnson said. “We used to think of software development as a primary skill, and it still is; however, it’s rapidly becoming the basis for all IT jobs.”

Specifically, Johnson points to an understanding of Python and R, “using standard APIs and Ansible (Python) to roll out configuration changes, leveraging cloud best practices that involve infrastructure as code using tools like terraform. All of these skillsets require modern IT engineers to think and be software developers.”

Product managers

The demand for talented product managers is still strong in the technology sector, says Arthur Hu, CIO at Lenovo, especially those with business acumen.

“They’re critical for being able to sit astride technology, business, and product direction discussions,” Hu says. “Great product managers can integrate well and deliver functionality and value to their users.”[ Learn how leading CIOs are reinventing IT. Download CIO’s new Think Tank report today! ]

Software developers (who can mentor)

Also in great need: Senior software engineers who can mentor junior programmers, Hu says.

“It’s important as companies continue to place more focus — and investment — in digital transformation,” he says. “Businesses are recognizing they can get differentiation from software, even if they are not traditionally a software business.”

CompTIA noted strong demand for IT pros in various nontechnology industries, including manufacturing, professional, scientific and technical services, finance, and insurance.

Anything cybersecurity

The skills gap is growing most acutely for multiple security roles that demand qualified candidates, says Kent Blackwell, senior manager of Schellman & Co.

“Blue team SOC analysts, web application security testers, network engineers that can lock down routers — the security space continues to grow at a rapid pace and demand is certainly outstripping supply,” Blackwell says. “Many security jobs require understanding the systems you are attacking or protecting, so starting with a career in network administration, the help desk, systems administration, or even a web development background are all good launching points for moving into a more security-focused role.”

Jeff Friess, director of the IT practice at Global Executive Solutions Group, says firms are so concerned about cybersecurity breaches — which may cost companies millions of dollars per incident — that there are many more open jobs than professionals to fill them.

Security analysts need to be generalists with skills that are more broad than deep, he says, with the ability to work in various areas of the company doing the hiring. “They should be able to think strategically and see the big picture regarding information security, and have the necessary interpersonal skills to deal with stakeholders and speak to board members.”

Data scientists and data engineers

Some argue that the growth of data science and machine learning has led to a demand for new positions that more accurately describe the work being done.

“The market is starting to get a better understanding of data science,” says Alvaro Oliveira, vice presidents of talent operations at Toptal. “And that’s causing multiple roles to exist underneath it instead of a single role — for instance, data engineers, who are closer to computer science, and data scientists, who make meaning out of the data but don’t have a typical computer science background.”

Flavio Villanustre, vice president of technology and chief information security officer at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, agrees that data scientists — along with data analysts and modelers — are difficult to find and specialization is likely to continue.

“Data science has become more complex, broader, and more involved, as it’s difficult for a single individual to possess all of the required knowledge,” Villanustre says. “Whether pursuing a career as a data analyst, a statistical modeler, or a data scientist — a subset of the two — there will be continuous career opportunities.”

Recruiters and hiring managers will have a hard time placing these positions because of the expertise required, says Ken Underhill, master instructor at Cybrary.

“There’s a lack of qualified candidates for these roles,” Underhill says. “Educational institutions are pushing to close the cyber talent gap — traditional universities and online sites, like Cybrary, Udacity, Coursera, etc. — however some experience of these roles is still needed to fully understand the intricacies involved in these areas.”

Machine learning and AI engineers

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, describes yet another role — machine learning engineer — which he calls “a portmanteau between a data engineer and data scientist. Companies who are looking for machine learning engineers typically want somebody who is good at the data science aspects of machine learning, but who are also engineers that are good at building and running systems. Companies who are hiring these positions are ahead of the game, and because of its importance to successful AI/ML projects, it’s only a matter of time until it becomes a position as common as a data scientist.”

As AI speeds how we work with massive amounts of data and converts it into actionable insights, the area is starved for new talent. Corporate and consumer interest are on the rise in areas such as automation and autonomous driving, which means engineers with deep learning experience are hard to find.

And if you’re thinking of investing in a shift, rest assured: The demand for engineers with AI, machine learning, and deep learning chops doesn’t look to be slowing anytime soon.

“With the intense focus on predictive analytics, deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, these positions should remain relevant for years to come,” says Villanustre.

Hu says AI careers demand “technical expertise that goes beyond data analytics, and enough business acumen to integrate with and apply knowledge to solving business problems.”

Multi-cloud integrator

Caleb Hailey, co-founder and CEO of Sensu, suggests that companies adopting mixed cloud environments have forced a change in integrator roles, which we’ve previously reported as in high demand.

“The reality of integrating otherwise loosely connected systems is getting more complex by the day, which means businesses need dedicated individuals — with the right skill set and experience — to connect them,” Hailey says. “Even cloud-native thought leaders will readily admit that there’s no magic bullet that you can use to solve every problem. You still have to use the right tool for the right job, and since these tools are increasingly cloud technologies and typically from more than one cloud platform or provider, you’re looking for cloud integrators to tie it all together.”

Full-stack engineer

Web users are increasingly demanding more robust, app-like consumer experiences, which has led to strong demand for front- and back-end web developers — and even more for those who combine those skills as full-stack engineers.

“Technologies like progressive web apps are bringing the web experience closer to native on mobile platforms,” says Gautam Agrawal, vice president of products at Confluera. “And it won’t be long before web is the preferred choice for mobile app development, especially in the enterprise, for all the obvious benefits of cross-platform development.”

Familiarity with open-source platforms is key, says Candace Murphy, IT recruiting manager at Addison Group. “Larger trends in open-source development are growing. This trend is driven by companies moving away from the traditional platforms that require licensing fees.”

IoT engineer

IoT devices are overwhelming companies with data, much of it unstructured, and firms want to find ways to collect and make sense of that information in a timely way.

“The internet of things is where the world of technology is going,” says Dino Grigorakakis, vice president of recruiting at Randstad. “Working as an IoT engineer has a lot of current and future opportunity, the position is often competitively compensated, and experience with IoT will prepare candidates to move forward within the information technology industry even if they choose to move away from working directly with the internet of things.”

Lenovo’s Hu advises keeping an open mind and looking for characteristics and attributes of in-demand roles rather than specific areas.

“The reason for this is that with technology continuing to democratize, any functional area can be an opportunity to apply new techniques — including IoT, AI, low-code/no-code — just to name a few.”

Courtesy of: Paul Heltzel

Is SD-WAN out to kill MPLS?

13th August 2021/in Latest Posts/by ricardo

Which is better: SD-WAN or MPLS? The answer is that it depends–on cost, the demands of mission-critical apps, need for centralized management.

There is arguably no networking technology surrounded by more hype than software defined WANs (SD-WAN), and much of it is well deserved.

A significant number of network professionals either have an SD-WAN deployment underway or on their near-term roadmap. The reason is that SD-WAN architecture is optimized for cloud computing while legacy WANs were designed when client-server computing was the norm.

As work-from-home has shifted more apps to the cloud, the adoption of SD-WAN has accelerated.

Is SD-WAN an MPLS killer?

The short answer is, “No.” The reality is the two technologies are complementary, so it’s important to understand how to use each to design a network that provides not simply the best possible price, but the best price—performance.

Still, many SD-WAN vendors have been positioning SD-WAN as an MPLS killer because the newer technology can leverage multiple broadband circuits to connect branch offices. The thesis from much of the vendor community, particularly startups, is that businesses can ditch their traditional MPLS network and save a significant amount on telecom charges. It’s true that broadband circuits are cheaper than MPLS, but that doesn’t mean MPLS no longer has a purpose in enterprise WANs.

Benefits of MPLS

MPLS (short for multiprotocol label switching) is a network protocol that controls the flow of traffic between two locations. MPLS networks are dedicated, private networks and use advanced routing protocols to send varying types of traffic across the network using different paths. For example, video and voice need a low-latency route to ensure performance is high, but general internet traffic might take a more congested route because delay is not such an issue. The benefit of MPLS is it guarantees fast, reliable packet delivery, making it ideal for high-performance or real-time applications.

Cost of MPLS

The downside of MPLS is cost, which can be significant for long distance, global connections.

One characteristic traditional MPLS networks have is that it uses an active—passive architecture. This means enterprise customers have to buy two links but can only send traffic over the primary one unless it fails completely; only then is traffic rerouted over the passive link. To get that added network reliability, customers effectively purchase bandwidth twice for a single connection.

SD-WAN cost advantage

SD-WANs are an overlay to existing networks that could include MPLS but most often use broadband for the last mile and then the internet for the middle mile. The technology enables businesses to leverage multiple network connections in an active—active architecture where traffic can be sent over the best connection as determined in real time. Determining factors include the delay-sensitivity of traffic, time of day, cost, and the current status of individual links.

Use of internet and broadband connections rather than MPLS is less expensive, is more reliable because it affords multiple paths, and offers more flexibility. The flexibility is due to the software-defined nature of SD-WAN that decouples the control aspect of the network from the hardware so network-wide routing changes can be managed centrally and executed in a fraction of the time it would take in an all-MPLS WAN.

Lower cost, increased network reliability, and centralized management are among the potential benefits of SD-WAN.

SD-WAN shortcomings

The downside of SD-WAN is that application performance can be unpredictable if the network is solely built on broadband internet whose performance is variable and unpredictable. In this scenario, the multi-path capabilities of SD-WAN improve reliability, but application performance can be hard to manage.

Latency comparisons

When designing an SD-WAN it may be tempting to make it all-broadband because long-distance MPLS connections can be very expensive, often several thousand of dollars for trans-oceanic connections as compared to local broadband.

Businesses must ask themselves if the cost-to-predictability tradeoff is worth it. There is no single right answer because all businesses are different, but for most companies, certain apps wouldn’t perform well with the unpredictability of broadband and internet, and that could pose a risk to the business. Examples include trading systems, real-time CAD programs, and voice and video.

Differences in response time

Recently, I took a look at how big the performance difference is between using MPLS or an internet connection to connect cities that are far apart. The average response time between Dallas, Texas, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, using MPLS was about 50ms compared to about 600ms using the internet.

What’s even more striking is the variability between the best and worst times.

With MPLS, the Dallas—Dubai response time varies by 12% compared to 153% for internet. Similarly, Dubai to Mumbai varies 15% with MPLS and 212% for the internet. Even transcontinental connections see quite a bit of disparity with a connection between San Jose, California, and Washington, DC—a variability of 5% with MPLS and 82% with internet. Once the length of the link drops to about half of the US, the difference in variability is much less, making an all-broadband WAN a no-brainer.

The problem with a variance this large is it creates a situation where some applications can work great sometimes and perform horribly at other times. This kind of inconsistency can be highly disruptive as it can negatively affect how apps perform and therefore reduce productivity. Small businesses and regional companies can use an all-internet WAN and likely won’t see much of an impact on user experience because the length of connections for important traffic is short enough. But that’s not the case for nationwide or global enterprises.

For these far-flung businesses, optimizing cost and performance involves using SD-WAN as an architecture to blend together broadband and internet—as well as MPLS—to create a best-of-both-worlds scenario.

That can be done by using broadband for last-mile connectivity and a combination of internet and MPLS for long-haul connections. The multiple broadband connections ensure resilient connectivity, and apps can be directed either over MPLS or the internet, based on the performance they require. High performance, real-time, and mission-critical apps would be directed over MPLS, and best-effort traffic would use the internet. By doing so, businesses can cut the amount they spend on MPLS by right-sizing those circuits to deliver connectivity for just the subset of business apps that demand a high-performing network.

The savings on MPLS can often dwarf the investment in SD-WAN infrastructure, so with a bit of good planning and up-front homework, companies can lower their total cost of running the network.

The rise of SD-WAN has raised the question whether SD-WAN or MPLS is better. The answer is both as they are used to solve different problems. One doesn’t replace the other; rather they are complementary.

Courtesy of: Zeus Kerravala