What Is SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) And Its Benefits For Enterprises

March 7, 2019 | 110 views

Cloud-based technologies and service models are changing the way companies are doing business and drive innovation. Fundamentally, there are three main categories of cloud computing services: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). This article focuses on Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is a service model in which a provider hosts the application and makes it available to customers over the Internet. This is a significant departure from the on-premises software delivery model allowing organizations to outsource most of the IT responsibilities.

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Indegy

Indegy provides situational awareness and real-time security for industrial control networks to ensure operational continuity and reliability. The Indegy platform delivers comprehensive visibility and oversight into all OT activities, including changes to controller logic, configuration and state, across all vendor devices, by utilizing control network inspection of proprietary control communications, and patent-pending agentless controller verification technology that validate PLC firmware, code and configuration.

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SOFTWARE

Empowering Industry 4.0 with Artificial Intelligence

Article | July 13, 2022

The next step in industrial technology is about robotics, computers and equipment becoming connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and enhanced by machine learning algorithms. Industry 4.0 has the potential to be a powerful driver of economic growth, predicted to add between $500 billion- $1.5 trillion in value to the global economy between 2018 and 2022, according to a report by Capgemini.

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AI TECH

How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Businesses

Article | July 11, 2022

Whilst there are many people that associate AI with sci-fi novels and films, its reputation as an antagonist to fictional dystopic worlds is now becoming a thing of the past, as the technology becomes more and more integrated into our everyday lives. AI technologies have become increasingly more present in our daily lives, not just with Alexa’s in the home, but also throughout businesses everywhere, disrupting a variety of different industries with often tremendous results. The technology has helped to streamline even the most mundane of tasks whilst having a breath-taking impact on a company’s efficiency and productivity

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INNOVATION, SOFTWARE, FUTURE TECH

The advances of AI in healthcare

Article | November 14, 2022

With the Government investing £250 million into the project, the Lab will consider how to use AI for the benefit of patients – whether this be the deployment of existing AI methods, the development of new technologies or the testing of their safety. Amongst other things, the initiative will aim to deliver earlier diagnoses of cancer. It is estimated that in excess of 50,000 extra patients could see their cancer being detected at an early stage, thus boosting survival rates. More specifically, a study has shown that AI is quicker in identifying brain tumour tissue than a pathologist.This would have a positive knock-on effect in other areas, such as enabling money to be saved (that otherwise would have been spent on further treatment) and reducing the workload of staff (at a time when there is a crisis in NHS workforce numbers).

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Three Keys to Successful AI Adoption

Article | February 10, 2020

Over the past several years, we have begun to see the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in businesses. According to a study for the AI Index 2019 Annual Report, more than half of respondents report their companies are using AI in at least one function or business unit. Thirty percent report they have AI embedded across multiple areas of their business. As businesses continue to develop their understanding of what is possible with AI, we can expect to see a continued increase in AI adoption.

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Spotlight

Indegy

Indegy provides situational awareness and real-time security for industrial control networks to ensure operational continuity and reliability. The Indegy platform delivers comprehensive visibility and oversight into all OT activities, including changes to controller logic, configuration and state, across all vendor devices, by utilizing control network inspection of proprietary control communications, and patent-pending agentless controller verification technology that validate PLC firmware, code and configuration.

Related News

Exploring specific security pain points with enterprise cloud adoption

Cloud Tech | January 25, 2019

While the enterprise push to public cloud continues apace, it does not hurt to hear of figures which puts the scope of the journey in perspective. According to new figures from Ping Identity, only one in five enterprises polled said they have more than half of their IT infrastructure hosted in the public cloud. Three quarters (75%) in comparison have a hybrid approach. Perhaps not surprisingly, the key aspect holding these organisations back is security. 43% of the 300 US-based respondents said it was the biggest obstacle to cloud adoption, while 37% said it was the biggest barrier to software as a service (SaaS) adoption. There are plenty of reasons to be fearful. More than a quarter (27%) of those polled admitted they have experienced a breach of customer identity data stored either in a public cloud, on-premises or SaaS app provider's cloud. As a result, 71% said they were spending more on protecting customer identity data on a yearly basis. When it came to specific security tools, multi-factor authentication was cited by nine out of 10 respondents as an effective control. Yet only 60% of firms polled said they used it. Identity federation and biometric authentication were also seen as key methods, but adoption was low at 34% and 22% respectively. Even though the new year is only less than a month old, research has shown continued enterprise concern around security in the cloud. According to NetEnrich, large enterprises were 'eagerly adopting cloud infrastructure, applications and services', albeit with three quarters (72%) noting security was their top priority for this year.

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LogicMonitor Steps Up Its Monitoring for Microservices, Containerized Applications

SDxCentral | January 15, 2019

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based monitoring provider LogicMonitor implemented new capabilities into its platform to help DevOps professionals peer into microservices and containerized applications. LogicMonitor’s self-named performance monitoring platform is based on a SaaS architecture and relies on automation to collect performance data from a variety of environments. This includes on-premises, cloud, and hybrid architectures such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, servers, storage, networks, virtualization, applications, websites — and now Kubernetes, microservices, and containerized applications. As Kubernetes and other containerized environments grow increasingly popular, monitoring these environments has created new challenges for enterprises. These architectures are more difficult to monitor than more traditional environments because of the increase in application data, and they are more complex than what traditional monitoring tools are equipped to handle. Prior to today’s launch, LogicMonitor offered Docker container monitoring. “With increasing adoption of Kubernetes to orchestrate these containers, we saw a need to provide a more comprehensive container monitoring solution that integrates with orchestration,” said Sarah Terry, manager of product management at LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor’s new Kubernetes monitoring tool provides event-based Kubernetes monitoring. According to the company, the tool will monitor as an enterprise splits a monolithic service into microservices orchestrated with Kubernetes. The tool does this by automatically adding and removing cluster resources from the monitoring platform. The Kubernetes monitoring also eliminates the need to have an agent on every node. According to Terry, this is because the tool relies on two applications running in the cluster: one as a pod for monitoring and the other as a pod for discovery. The discovery application reads the Kubernetes event stream and leverages LogicMonitor’s existing API to keep everything up to date. Data is collected from Kubernetes nodes, pods, services, and containers using the Kubernetes API.

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The future of enterprise software: Big data and AI rules okay – and the ‘decentralisation of SaaS’

Cloud Tech | August 17, 2018

Machine learning, cloud-native and containers are going to be key growth drivers of the future enterprise software stack – but it could be the end of the road for software as a service (SaaS). That’s the verdict from an extensive new report by venture capital fund Work-Bench. The full 121-slide analysis (Scribd), titled ‘The Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition’, aims to dissect a ‘once in a decade tectonic shift of infrastructure’, focusing on the new wave of services that will power the cloud from the end of this decade onwards. “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees,” wrote Michael Yamnitsky, report author and VC at Work-Bench. “For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters. It’s wishful thinking, but we also hope new talent gets excited about enterprise.” If this analysis is anything go by, there will be plenty to get excited about in the coming years. Large technology companies are winning at AI, Work-Bench asserts. And why not? This publication has devoted plenty of column inches in recent months to how among the hyperscalers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning as a differentiator – indeed, Google Cloud this week launched pre-packaged AI services to try and stay one step ahead of the competition. It’s not so much of a differentiator if everyone’s getting in on the act, though. And this is where others are struggling. “Despite hopeful promise, startups racing to democratise AI are finding themselves stuck between open source and a cloud place,” the report notes.

Read More

Exploring specific security pain points with enterprise cloud adoption

Cloud Tech | January 25, 2019

While the enterprise push to public cloud continues apace, it does not hurt to hear of figures which puts the scope of the journey in perspective. According to new figures from Ping Identity, only one in five enterprises polled said they have more than half of their IT infrastructure hosted in the public cloud. Three quarters (75%) in comparison have a hybrid approach. Perhaps not surprisingly, the key aspect holding these organisations back is security. 43% of the 300 US-based respondents said it was the biggest obstacle to cloud adoption, while 37% said it was the biggest barrier to software as a service (SaaS) adoption. There are plenty of reasons to be fearful. More than a quarter (27%) of those polled admitted they have experienced a breach of customer identity data stored either in a public cloud, on-premises or SaaS app provider's cloud. As a result, 71% said they were spending more on protecting customer identity data on a yearly basis. When it came to specific security tools, multi-factor authentication was cited by nine out of 10 respondents as an effective control. Yet only 60% of firms polled said they used it. Identity federation and biometric authentication were also seen as key methods, but adoption was low at 34% and 22% respectively. Even though the new year is only less than a month old, research has shown continued enterprise concern around security in the cloud. According to NetEnrich, large enterprises were 'eagerly adopting cloud infrastructure, applications and services', albeit with three quarters (72%) noting security was their top priority for this year.

Read More

LogicMonitor Steps Up Its Monitoring for Microservices, Containerized Applications

SDxCentral | January 15, 2019

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based monitoring provider LogicMonitor implemented new capabilities into its platform to help DevOps professionals peer into microservices and containerized applications. LogicMonitor’s self-named performance monitoring platform is based on a SaaS architecture and relies on automation to collect performance data from a variety of environments. This includes on-premises, cloud, and hybrid architectures such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, servers, storage, networks, virtualization, applications, websites — and now Kubernetes, microservices, and containerized applications. As Kubernetes and other containerized environments grow increasingly popular, monitoring these environments has created new challenges for enterprises. These architectures are more difficult to monitor than more traditional environments because of the increase in application data, and they are more complex than what traditional monitoring tools are equipped to handle. Prior to today’s launch, LogicMonitor offered Docker container monitoring. “With increasing adoption of Kubernetes to orchestrate these containers, we saw a need to provide a more comprehensive container monitoring solution that integrates with orchestration,” said Sarah Terry, manager of product management at LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor’s new Kubernetes monitoring tool provides event-based Kubernetes monitoring. According to the company, the tool will monitor as an enterprise splits a monolithic service into microservices orchestrated with Kubernetes. The tool does this by automatically adding and removing cluster resources from the monitoring platform. The Kubernetes monitoring also eliminates the need to have an agent on every node. According to Terry, this is because the tool relies on two applications running in the cluster: one as a pod for monitoring and the other as a pod for discovery. The discovery application reads the Kubernetes event stream and leverages LogicMonitor’s existing API to keep everything up to date. Data is collected from Kubernetes nodes, pods, services, and containers using the Kubernetes API.

Read More

The future of enterprise software: Big data and AI rules okay – and the ‘decentralisation of SaaS’

Cloud Tech | August 17, 2018

Machine learning, cloud-native and containers are going to be key growth drivers of the future enterprise software stack – but it could be the end of the road for software as a service (SaaS). That’s the verdict from an extensive new report by venture capital fund Work-Bench. The full 121-slide analysis (Scribd), titled ‘The Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition’, aims to dissect a ‘once in a decade tectonic shift of infrastructure’, focusing on the new wave of services that will power the cloud from the end of this decade onwards. “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees,” wrote Michael Yamnitsky, report author and VC at Work-Bench. “For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters. It’s wishful thinking, but we also hope new talent gets excited about enterprise.” If this analysis is anything go by, there will be plenty to get excited about in the coming years. Large technology companies are winning at AI, Work-Bench asserts. And why not? This publication has devoted plenty of column inches in recent months to how among the hyperscalers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning as a differentiator – indeed, Google Cloud this week launched pre-packaged AI services to try and stay one step ahead of the competition. It’s not so much of a differentiator if everyone’s getting in on the act, though. And this is where others are struggling. “Despite hopeful promise, startups racing to democratise AI are finding themselves stuck between open source and a cloud place,” the report notes.

Read More

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