DEV Community: Gaurav Belani

8 Benefits Of Using Data Analytics In Human Resources

Gaurav Belani — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 07:48:51 +0000

Ever since big data entered the picture, it has helped businesses make better business decisions and increase revenues. From manufacturing and automobiles to healthcare and retail, big data has emerged as the game-changer in every industry.

Organizational departments such as finance, operations, and sales also benefit by leveraging big data analytics in their day-to-day functioning. Human Resources is no exception.

A KPMG report says that by 2022, 60% of HR departments will invest in predictive analysis and 47% in Artificial Intelligence, improving almost every HR area, including recruitment, performance, compensation, with 53% using data analytics to make strategic decisions.

Source

There are many key advantages that HR professionals can experience, provided they tap into the full potential of data analytics. Here are the top eight benefits:

1. Improved hiring processes

Data analytics is changing the way HR managers hire employees. It reduces the time required to find, review and accept new hires by streamlining their process with talent acquisition software. It eases their workload and saves precious time.

The latest recruitment modules allow them to screen applicants, schedule interviews, and access required data on demand. Thanks to mobile optimization, HR teams can perform all crucial operations on the go.

Data analytics is also changing the way HR approaches employee management. For instance, it has become easier for managers to identify unyielding or inefficient processes. They can build evidence-based strategies for improved decision-making and a productive work environment.

2. Better growth opportunities

HR leaders can use big data analytics to understand, predict, and respond to growth opportunities. This means that they will be able to access information about the workforce efficiently at all times.

This form of analysis enables them to make informed decisions, such as hiring or firing employees. It cultivates a culture of proactive human resources management across the organization.

HR professionals can also use big data for workforce analytics and gain more information about their business operations. It helps HR leaders to understand their employees better and identify opportunities for growth at the individual level.

3. Optimized workforce planning

On a typical day at work, there are many interactions between people and their environment. Big data helps us understand how we interact with others in the workplace to make experiences better for everyone involved.

Research shows that 89% of HR teams use HR metrics to plan the future of their workforce. For example, they can target increasing the percentage of female employees in the business by 25% and measure their performance based on that parameter.

Data analytics can also be used to solve problems about engagement or changes in culture within organizations. It is convenient in managing the change management process. When a business changes, the way the HR department function also evolves.

For instance, a new law that the business must follow could change the way the HR team will hire, train, or pay employees. Similarly, the work from home arrangement changed how HR teams handled recruitment and payroll due to the pandemic.

4. Reduced attrition rate

Data analytics can be used to reduce employee turnover by identifying patterns and trends of attrition. HR managers can quickly address the issues of an employee before it becomes a problem. It reduces the churn and improves the retention rate.

5. Informed payroll decisions

Employers can use workforce analytics to understand better how to reduce their second-largest expense after payroll and employee benefits. One way of doing this is by understanding the utilization trends and correlating them with the employees' churn data to get insights into what benefit resonates most with an individual, allowing a more optimal experience at work.

6. Greater visibility on employee skill gaps

According to HBR, 94% of HR professionals had real-time insights into their employees' career development goals thanks to a high level of sophisticated analytical activity.

Predictive models and AI can help HR identify opportunities to maximize skill crossover, improve skills through training programs, and assess career planning options.

Strategic analysis ensures employees work in the right roles that provide them with development opportunities and positively impact vital life-cycle stages.

With the right technology, like machine learning, it is possible to gather data and measure its impact on your business.

Big data-powered people analytics can help create a positive culture with higher employee engagement, better performance metrics, and a more robust organizational structure.

It also helps identify process bottlenecks or knowledge gaps leading to disengagement and makes HR teams more effective while creating lasting value.

Employers can use data analytics to create future business plans and anticipate the roles they must hire or train employees as their company grows. Doing so minimizes hiring costs by ensuring employees possess the necessary skill sets before they are needed for a role.

7. Higher employee engagement

Engaging employees is always a top priority for HR leaders, and it has become more relevant than ever in the current times of remote working. Big data enables them to identify and reward top performers.

Similarly, HR teams can also identify employees with performance issues or low motivation with big data analytics. It helps analyze KPIs, track the achievement of targets, and display details of leaves taken by an employee.

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The information allows HR to pinpoint employees at risk of being disengaged from their work. AI-powered employee engagement platforms enable companies to check in with employees weekly via text messaging.

Employees can rate their work experience throughout the week, and managers hold themselves accountable for checking up on them if they give a low score. The data collected is invaluable as the information is captured in real-time.

8. Control on harassment issues

Data analysis can be helpful in the fight against issues like sexual harassment and gender bias as it can help discover behavioral issues and resolve them through strategic plans.

Data about employee issues and the frequency of cases occurring most frequently, along with the number of reports over time, can be studied for decision-making. Managers who collect data every month and ask the right questions will be able to identify red flags.

Over to you

Big data can bring powerful transformations to the HR team and organizations as a whole. The transformation will be impactful and far-reaching, so it is beneficial for any HR department that wants strong results and future success with its people and talent strategies.

(Cover Image from jaydeep_ / Pixabay)

How APIs Can Help Enterprises With Quality Assurance

Gaurav Belani — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 05:28:41 +0000

For the most part, the success of any business depends on the quality of products or services it provides. And so, quality assurance (QA) — the process of ensuring that an enterprise's quality requirements are being met at all stages of the value chain — is indispensable.

Through frequent timely audits and other means of evaluation, quality assurance efforts are essentially meant to systematically identify and correct problems and discrepancies that violate the established quality standards.

Simply put, QA ensures the desired quality of products and services right from the development stage to the order fulfillment and customer service stage.

Nearly every business has some form of quality assurance in place, from producers of consumer packaged goods to software startups. Many enterprises even have a separate quality management department with dedicated staff for quality assurance.

But while having dedicated quality assurance staff is important, your enterprise can also greatly benefit from external QA solutions via the use of APIs.

In this post, you’ll see how external APIs can help with quality assurance for businesses, using real examples from tech startups that are facilitating QA for enterprises.

But first, let’s quickly recap...

What APIs Are and Why Use Them for QA

An Application Programming Interface or API is basically a set of code that allows data transmission between one software product and another.

Source: Medium

So if your business needs access to information/functionality from another company that specializes in providing that data, you’ll call its API while specifying the requirements of how data/functionality must be provided. The other software then returns the data/functionality requested by your application.

In simple terms, you can think of APIs as contracts, with documentation that represents an agreement between parties: If one party sends a remote request structured in a specific way, this is how the other party’s software will respond. APIs enable you to quickly connect with data/functionality providers and you don’t have to deal with source code or understand how the other solution works.

So the question is — why are APIs useful for QA? As mentioned in the beginning, quality assurance is the process of ensuring that an enterprise's quality requirements are being met at all stages of the value chain.

Now, there are different types of stakeholders involved at each stage of the value chain. They want to see information that’s relevant to them so they can ensure they’re getting the desired quality. Using APIs from the right third-party providers, an enterprise can obtain all that information and present it to the stakeholders in a unified interface and can also control who has access to what data.

For example, if you’re a fiber optic cable manufacturer, you wouldn’t want to give customers access to your factory analytics system, but you would want to have an interface for your customers that enables them to know at any given moment what percentage of their order has passed stress testing, which is an important part of quality assurance.

It’s far easier to accomplish this with the use of an API from a third-party vendor that communicates this data from your internal system to an external customer interface.

To better understand exactly how APIs can aid enterprises with quality assurance, let’s take a look at some more concrete examples.

Examples of APIs Boosting QA in the Enterprise

Consider you own a large-scale food eCommerce brand. It has an elaborate supply chain consisting of procurement, product development, logistics, marketing, distribution, and ultimately customer service.

Now, in each stage of the chain, your enterprise will benefit from third-party data and functionality from reliable solutions providers to boost the efficiency, transparency, and agility of the business operations.

For example, think about the logistics — when it comes to quality assurance and transparency, the ability to monitor package conditions throughout the value chain is vital. You need answers to questions such as:

What was the route your package took between leaving the factory and reaching your facility?
What was its temperature along the way?
Was it subjected to any shocks or tilting, which may have damaged it?

Such condition analytics using data loggers are invaluable to ensuring the package’s quality.

Now, instead of building the entire data logging system from scratch — which is a huge investment of time and money — the enterprise can simply retrieve all the information via an API from a reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient data logging systems provider like Logmore.

With Logmore’s API, you don’t need to build any extra infrastructure to get all your supply chain conditions analytics. You read the QR code — which contains data on where the product comes from and other basic, preset information — with a smartphone or a scanner, and the latest data is uploaded securely to your own enterprise application.

So you get extensive transparency of what happens to your food shipments, down to each specific item.

Similarly, the second example can be in the customer service department at the end of the chain, where you need to build a powerful support experience for your customers. This involves building custom support workflows by integrating CRMs and order, inventory, and project management.

You also need an infrastructure to automate common customer issues (order status, delivery date changes, refunds and returns) with bots, and access to various support metrics to evaluate the performance of agents, bots, FAQ knowledge bases, and more.

Again, rather than creating the whole customer experience system from the ground up, you can integrate all these functionalities into your existing system by using APIs from established third-party customer service platforms like Helpshift or Zendesk.

And so, it’s evident that APIs can simplify quality assurance for enterprises so they can focus their efforts on other value-adding activities that lead to faster growth.

Closing Thoughts

An enterprise can build a strong reputation for reliability only when it ensures consistent quality levels in all its offerings and also customer service.

Simply put, quality assurance is a promise that customers will have the best possible experience with your enterprise each time they do business with you. This helps you stand out from your competitors, boosts consumer confidence in your brand, and also encourages customers to stay loyal to your business and spread the good word.

And as you can see, external APIs from innovative technology companies can provide crucial data to improve the transparency and efficiency of your entire value chain. So using the right APIs can indeed contribute significantly to your business’s quality assurance success.

(Image Source: Freepik)

4 Common WordPress Migration Myths Explained and Dispelled

Gaurav Belani — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 10:54:31 +0000

WordPress is the most popular CMS that’s fuelling nearly 40% of websites in 2021. If we consider websites using a CMS, WordPress enjoys a market share of 64.1%. That’s because WordPress comes with a host of features for web developers in areas, such as user experience, mobile usability, security, speed, and SEO. No wonder, site migrations to WordPress from Sitecore, Joomla, and other CMS is quite common.

However, WordPress is only as good as its infrastructure. If you aren’t using the right hosting provider, you may experience issues like poor performance and hours of downtime. As a result, most webmasters plan WordPress migrations to increase their site’s responsiveness.

But WordPress migrations aren’t easy. The process involves exporting databases and files to a new host and optimizing all the elements to have a fully functional website. As if this wasn’t enough, the myths and half-truths surrounding the process have made it tough for webmasters to ensure a faultless WordPress migration.

In this post, we will dispel the common WordPress migration myths, allowing you to make the switch with ease.

1. WordPress Migration Can Damage My Ranking

WordPress site migration sounds like bad news for SEO. So much time and resources have gone into boosting those rankings on Google. What happens when the website moves to a new host?

Well, the fact is that your website SEO (regardless of the CMS) is bound to take a temporary hit. However, this will not last for long. On the contrary, your site’s SEO will benefit from the advanced SEO features offered by the new host.

Yes, the first week post migration will be awkward because Google will take some time to recrawl and index your webpages and give you back your ranking. But overall, migrations help webpages rank better by building a strong SEO framework.

Plus, WordPress offers loads of plugins that can help you migrate without dumping your site’s ranking.

Use these tips to migrate with minimal impact on SEO.

Update the internal links on your website.
Use Google Analytics to keep an eye on your site’s analytics
post-migration. Keep looking for gaps that are affecting your SEO, allowing you to take the necessary corrective measures.
Keep old domains and redirect your website.
Check for broken links and duplicate content. These will impact your SEO.
Manage your sitemaps.
Update PPC campaigns and ad creatives if any.

2. WordPress Migrations Aren’t Secure

It’s not uncommon to hear of the security threats and hacker attacks on WordPress websites. WordFence confirms that there are almost 90,000 attacks per minute on WordPress websites. Such news and reports have resulted in a prevalent myth when it comes to WordPress migrations - the process isn’t secure!

The truth is no CMS is immune to hacker attacks. Yet, the core platform of WordPress is designed by a team that’s committed to making migrations as secure as possible. Moreover, the CMS offers multiple security plugins and features that make the process more secure.

If you are considering a WordPress website migration, we strongly recommend installing plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri Security that can help you deal with sensitive data during the process.

3. Large WordPress Site Migrations Take Ages

Large websites with tons of media files can indeed take a lot of time to download. But there’s a way around this! So, it’s a myth that this issue cannot be managed.

Firstly, try to do a file transfer in a place where you have a good internet connection. Plus, follow the below-mentioned steps for a quick transfer of files.

Before transferring, make a compressed archive (.zip or .rar) of the media files. It’s easier and faster to move one big file versus thousands of small ones. However, some hosting providers do not allow SSH access to the server.
If you only have FTP/SFTP access, avoid using it directly when transferring multiple files. Try alternating download/upload connections by using LFTP and mirror commands.
If you have SSH access to the old and new servers, transfer your files directly.

4.Migration Leads to Loss of Data

Most webmasters are wary of WordPress site migrations because they fear losing precious content and data. In a way, this concern is valid as no one wants their hard-earned data to fall off the ship when switching ports.

But data loss occurs only when you do not take the necessary steps and precautions when migrating the site. Successful migrations ensure that all the data and content are intact.

Here are a few effective tips to ensure that your precious website data isn’t lost during the switch.

Crawl the website before migration. Use the crawl data to check for URL-related issues. Check each URL to spot any missing content and take effective measures to fix it.
Keep your old website stable until the migration process is complete.
When migrating WordPress websites, check for duplicate content. As mentioned earlier, this can negatively affect your SEO.

Content duplication is a common issue encountered when site owners take extra precautions to avoid losing content during a migration.

Summing Up

Migrating WordPress websites doesn’t have to be complicated, provided you take the necessary precautions. However, the misconceptions shared above can make it challenging for webmasters to even think of initiating the process. That’s the reason we’ve attempted to dispel these myths. We hope you’ll use this information to successfully migrate your WordPress website.

How to Leverage Cloud Services to Launch your eCommerce Business

Gaurav Belani — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 12:20:37 +0000

Many times we have experienced that while shopping for our favorite phone model, which has been launched exclusively by a particular e-commerce site for a limited period at a great discount, we tend to experience very slow response or at times even fail to transact. This is because millions of other people are hitting the website at the same time and the website is unable to cater to this sudden spike in traffic effectively.

Be it a festival sale or a new product launch or buying air tickets, we all have gone through this undesired experience while navigating a website or while transacting.

E-commerce websites generally experience unpredictable traffic patterns and hence are unable to offer the same user experience every time. The underlying IT infrastructure is not able to meet up to the real-time elasticity of demand and hence upscale and downscale accordingly.

At the same time, the cost of IT infrastructure also adds to the overall cost of operations, and hence it is imperative that underlying IT infrastructure is optimally provisioned.

Cloud computing enables an e-commerce application to cater to the changing demand and scenarios of the market. It allows to upscale or downscale the services according to the demand, traffic, and seasonal spikes. Cloud provides the scalable architecture your business needs.

Today with the advent of hyperscalers like Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft, we have a huge advantage of availing on-demand scalability of the IT infrastructure and pay for what we consume. This makes it extremely relevant for e-commerce businesses to rely on these hyperscalers for their IT infrastructure needs.

If you are considering cloud services to launch your e-commerce business, here are three important acronyms to wrap your head around:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Cloud-based services, pay-as-you-go for services such as compute, storage, networking, and virtualization.

Example: AWS EC2, AWD S3 for Storage, Google Compute Engine (GCE)
Characteristics of IaaS:

Highly flexible and scalable

Cost-effective with a lower total cost of ownership

No need to provide manpower to manage IT infrastructure

When to use IaaS:

IaaS is beneficial to businesses of all shapes and sizes, as it allows complete control over your infrastructure. It operates on a pay-as-you-use model and so it fits into most budgets.

This can be used when you are expecting a surge in traffic such as during a festive season sale or a new product launch.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

These are services where hardware and software tools are available over the internet.

Example: AWS Elastic Beanstalk RDS
Characteristics of PaaS:

Provides tools and services to developers who intend to quickly build software applications

Build on virtualization of technology

Easy to use without needing system administration knowledge

When to use PaaS:

PaaS is often the most cost-effective and time-effective way for a developer to create a unique application.

PaaS allows the developer to focus on the creative side of app development, as opposed to menial tasks such as managing software updates or security patches. All of their time and brainpower will go into creating, testing, and deploying the app.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

These are services where software is available via a third-party over the internet.

Example of SaaS: SaaS platforms make software available to users over the internet, usually for a monthly subscription fee. All the maintenance, patch upgrade, security, and compliance are a part of the SaaS subscription.
Characteristics of SaaS:

Hosted on a third-party server by a third-party software provider

Security, upgrade, versioning and compliance is part of the cost
Scalable for multiple users on demand

When to use SaaS:

When an e-commerce business needs an “out-of-the-box” application that is ready to use for a specific need such as e-mail, CRM, etc.

Analytics applications to understand the patterns of traffic, customer buying patterns, demographics, etc. can be consumed out of the box.

Conclusion

As an e-commerce player, your core focus should be to build a very robust and reliable eco-system of suppliers, product quality, supply chain, and order fulfillment services. Technology will play a vital role in terms of creating a delightful user experience and eventually impact sales and repeat sales.

However, there are two important aspects that you have to keep in mind - recurring expenses which are predictable, and data security.

While using cloud services, at times you consume so many services that your monthly bill goes out of sight and it tends to surprise you. It is very important to keep on optimizing your cloud resources and services that you are using in order to keep your expenses on the cloud in control.

Similarly, it is imperative to make sure your cloud service provider and you have taken adequate measures from data privacy, security, and compliance standpoint.

(Cover Photo: Freepik)

How Business Intelligence Can Help Drive Marketing Success

Gaurav Belani — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 08:16:02 +0000

Business intelligence is the process of analysis of business information that can help enterprises to gain actionable insights to grow their business.

Business Intelligence (BI) technologies provide past, current, and predictive views of business operations.

BI can help enterprises sift through terabytes of raw data, and turn it into something that can be transformational for the growth of the business. BI can help you drive your resources in the right direction so that you can minimize losses and gain maximum ROI.

One of the key applications of BI is in the fields of marketing and sales. Since marketing has a direct impact on the ROI of your business, it is an area worth investing in.

In this guide, let’s look at some of the top ways in which business intelligence can help drive marketing success for your business.

1. Refine your Target Audience

Narrowing down and identifying the ideal target customer is a pain point for many top businesses. Without perfecting this step, it is difficult to cater your marketing campaigns to the right people, who are most likely to convert.

Using a business intelligence technology designed for enterprises, it is easy to drill down on your perfect ideal customer. Indeed, this type of platform can analyze all your existing customers and traffic sources, to come up with the most probable traits of your buyer persona, no matter how large your company and how diverse its data sources may be.

BI technologies use various factors such as demographics, ROI, engagement, purchase history, interactions, and similar more to build your ideal customer persona. This way, your marketing campaigns will be hyper-targeted towards the people who are most likely to convert, ultimately resulting in a massive increase in your ROI.

2. Personalizing Your Marketing Campaigns

Personalizing your marketing messaging and ad creative is key for getting the most out of your marketing campaigns.

However, personalization today is entirely different than it used to be a few years ago. Today, consumers want to feel special and valued. And thus, personalization in marketing can yield great results.

Business intelligence can be extremely beneficial in the personalization of marketing campaigns. It can be used to provide personalized product recommendations. And, the data from BI can also be used to personalize the messaging in such a way that it caters to the specific needs of your target customer.

3. Increasing Conversions

Generating highly qualified leads through marketing is surely a key step in your acquisition process. Converting these leads into loyal customers is altogether a different game, and business intelligence can increase your conversions massively.

Using the predictive analytics as provided by business intelligence, you can gain accurate insights into the future potential of all your prospects and leads. This information can make the world of difference for closing more sales.

Insights about each customer can be a great opportunity to convince the prospects to go with your business. And hence, BI can play a pivotal role in increasing your conversion rates to a great extent.

4. Increasing Sales from Existing Customers

Analyzing and managing your existing customers can seem almost an impossible task, only if you don't have the right tools to take care of it.

Your existing customers are more likely to make a purchase from you than new customers. In fact, studies show that 65% of your sales are likely to come from your existing customers. But how do you make your existing customers make more purchases from you? The best way to go about is to use BI. BI can help you identify and segment your existing customer base, based on their interests, demographics, purchasing patterns, etc.

You can create more focused marketing campaigns for each of these customer segments. This way, the chances of driving more sales from your existing customers is significantly increased. This also increases customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.

5. Generate Better Quality and Simplified Reports

Enterprises today can easily gather data from various sources. But, the problem lies in interpreting the data to provide insights that can be useful for the growth of the business. BI technologies can help to provide in-depth analytics and reports by interpreting and standardizing these data.

BI can also help gain reports within a shorter time. This is unlike traditional analytics that may take much longer to generate useful reports. Timely and accurate reports can be used to target events and promotions better.

Business intelligence can be used to gather data from several sources and convert it into something much more meaningful. These reports can be used to fine-tune your marketing and advertising strategies.

6. Provide Better Customer Experience

Customer experience is a very important factor in driving marketing success. Good customer experience can have an immensely positive impact on your customers’ minds leading them to take decisions in your favor.

Business intelligence can be revolutionary in providing a premium experience to your prospects and customers.

Through in-depth insights about the interests and needs of your customers, you can perfect your customer experience.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, we can say that business intelligence can be truly transformational in driving marketing success for your business. Right from targeting the right people, to gaining in-depth insights about your campaign, business intelligence can be a great addition to the growth of your enterprise.

Akeyless Vault Review: Secure Secrets Management with Ephemeral Delivery

Gaurav Belani — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 14:19:59 +0000

Many organizations and enterprises keep secrets without being mindful of their security. A February 2020 study by the Ponemon Institute found that 75 percent of respondents experienced compromised keys and certificates. This is just an example of a larger problem with mismanagement of secrets. Individuals and organizations are not careful in handling their API keys, encryption keys, tokens, private certificates, system-to-system passwords, and other secrets.

Such secrets need to be secured since they provide access to services, sensitive systems, data, and specific accounts. If it falls into the wrong hands, such secrets can thus be used to obtain other secrets or access your critical systems.

The good news is that achieving a high level of security does not have to be too complicated and technically cumbersome. This article is a review of Akeyless Vault, a secrets management solution that ensures your secrets are safe through distributed fragments cryptography and ephemeral secrets delivery.

Akeyless Vault Basics

Akeyless Vault makes it possible to manage numerous types of secrets through a graphical user interface (GUI), command-line interface (CLI), and plug-ins for native cloud platforms.

Technical users can be at home with the CLI option while those who are new to secrets management can take advantage of the simplified GUI and plug-in options. More technical users and developers can also utilize its SDKs and REST API to interface existing applications.

As a vault-as-a-service system, Akeyless provides plugin capability with popular cloud platforms, including Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Jenkins, CircleCI, Puppet, Chef, Slack, and many others. This simplifies and enhances the security of secrets management with these platforms.

To make logging into the Akeyless system fast but still highly secure, it supports third-party authentication including Okta, Azure Active Directory, and AWS IAM. It is also compatible with the SAML, LDAP, and OpenID authentication schemes. This is highly convenient especially for DevOps teams whose members are working on different platforms.

Additionally, it has a well-built role-based access management system. This allows the specification of who should be allowed to use the system and which secrets and keys they are permitted to access.

Akeyless Vault also comes with powerful dashboards and analytics to enable detailed monitoring. These tools facilitate the investigation of who made requests to access specific secrets and which secrets have been viewed.

This review focuses on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) flavor, but Akeyless Vault is also available as a single-tenant VPC and on-prem solution. Whichever deployment type you choose, you can expect dependable protection and similar intuitiveness in both onboarding and ongoing usage.

Secrets supported and use cases

Akeyless supports any kind of secret in any environment and for any use case. The Akeyless Vault works with five secret types, namely static and dynamic secrets, encryption keys, SSH certificate issuer and PKI certificate issuer. The platform can also be used to manage the TLS certificate lifecycle, enabling a highly-secure and automated creation, renewal, and revocation of certificates.

Static secrets are key/value-variable and include secrets such as passwords, API tokens, PII, and credit card numbers. Dynamic ones involve the creation of ad-hoc temporary credentials for specific resources, such as SQL DB and kubectl. Encryption keys refer to AES or RSA keys used to first full-encrypt any kind of data as well as to sign binaries or app transactions.

Akeyless also provides managed on-demand access in lieu of issuing permanent SSH keys. Instead of issuing SSH key pairs (public and private), the solution provides ephemeral certificates to allow access via SSH protocol, thus eliminating the need for permanent SSH keys.

Akeyless Vault is not only an excellent tool for storing secrets securely. It can also be used for TLS certificate automation, automated code signing from within the CI/CD pipeline, and on-the-fly data encryption.

It’s also worth mentioning that Akeyless can employ a Just-in-Time approach in storing and using secrets. This is made possible by the dynamic secrets function, through which users can automate the process of generating and using ephemeral secrets for specific tasks involving human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions. Akeyless can create short-lived credentials on a need-to-access basis, which are set to automatically expire shortly after a specific task has been completed.

The Akeyless architecture

You can use Akeyless for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also supports multi-region cloud to provide reliable service availability without the latency issues. This makes it suitable for low-connectivity environments.

Akeyless is completely separate from a customer’s environment and is only linked to the customer environment through GUI, CLI, or plugins. Customer secrets with regards to third-party services, databases, and applications are not duplicated and stored in the Akeyless secrets store. Instead, a unique technology (discussed below) is used to make sure that these sensitive data are never revealed to anyone, not even to the Akeyless service.

Guaranteed security with the Akeyless DFC technology

One of the most distinguishing features of Akeyless Vault is its use of its proprietary Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC) technology. This patent-pending tech entails the fragmentation of the key, as well as its retrieval and use without having to assemble it. Since secrets are encrypted with keys that are fragmented, this makes it virtually impossible for hackers or bad actors to obtain the secret.

Akeyless does not keep a copy of the complete secret on its servers. Also, the system ensures that there is no instance of the encrypted secret fragments appearing as a whole, not even within the customer’s environment. If anyone manages to steal something, the most they can get is a fragment of the actual secret--encrypted at that.

DFC enables zero-trust encryption in any multi-cloud or hybrid environment. This works as follows:

Keeping the key fragments of a secret in multiple regions or different cloud providers;
Constant and independent mathematical refresh of all fragments; and,
Storage of one fragment of every key in the customer’s environment.

Not even the technical team at Akeyless can access the full secrets of customers since one fragment of the split secrets is always kept in the customer’s server or computer, beyond the reach and control of Akeyless.

Other secrets management systems that employ fragmentation methods eventually have to combine the fragments whenever the user needs to retrieve and use the stored secrets. This is not the case for Akeyless. With DFC, combining the fragments is unnecessary, not even at the point of encryption or decryption.

Akeyless Vault is also NIST-FIPS 140-2 certified. The National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted rigorous third-party testing for the cryptography validation standards of Akeyless, and the platform passed. DFC technology was also found to be reliable and resistant to known key attacks as per peer review by renown cryptography researchers.

Solving the Secrets Zero problem

Akeyless developed a universal identity system that allows users to identify the customer’s machines without requiring an initial secret. It can securely authenticate client requests for services as well as for the distribution of secrets without asking for more credentials than what is necessary. When CSP IAM is not available, especially with legacy systems and private clouds involved, Akeyless uses short-lived starting tokens and periodically rotated identity tokens to preserve and secure an identity. This unique solution automates identity creation based on identification details derived from the parent server.

Intuitiveness and usability

Akeyless Vault has a minimalistic interface that should be easy to become familiar with. The links and buttons for the important functions are shown on the left sidebar. These include links for creating or configuring the secrets and keys, access roles, and authentication methods.

The saved secrets and keys in Akeyless are displayed in the middle section of the user interface. You can view them as a list or collection of folders. The view mode toggle is located to the left of the New button.

Clicking on a secret or key on the list opens the details in a panel to the right of the list. This panel has editable fields. You can add more details such as the location and description. You may also delete the secret by clicking on the Delete icon on the top right corner.

Adding a secret, key, or certificate issuer to Akeyless Vault is a quick and simple process. Click on the New button to display the different options available: Encryption Key, Static Secret, Dynamic Secret, SSH Cert Issuer, and PKI Cert Issuer. Click on the option you want and fill out the form that appears.

If you are not sure about using some of Akeyless Vault’s functions, you can refer to the how-to guides linked on the left sidebar. There are tutorials on configuring keyless SSH and creating dynamic secrets to SQL DB, among many others, as quick reference. Akeyless does have full documentation of its solution, which provides a more comprehensive coverage.

If the written guides don’t suffice, you can click on the Online Support link on the bottom part of the left sidebar to ask for technical assistance through Slack or email.

Adding and configuring access roles and authorization follows the same process as adding secrets and keys. Again, if you are not sure about the information you need to enter in the different form fields, use the how-to guides. They provide enough simplified information even newbies in using secrets management tools should easily figure out.

Audit logs and analytics

Akeyless Vault has audit logs and analytics features useful in monitoring secrets and the use of the system. The audit logs provide a detailed list of instances of access to the Akeyless Vault system. The lists include the time and date of access, the kind of activities undertaken, status code, access ID, and IP address.

The Analytics feature provides a visual guide on the use of the secrets and keys stored in the Vault. It presents a chart of the different items stored, a cartographic representation of the secret access requests made (within the last minute, hour, or day), data on requests by action, and graphs for request volumes and response times.

Integration Center

Akeyless has a sliding integration bar at the bottom part of the interface. You can hide it if you find it obstructive by clicking on the Close button to the right. This provides quick guides on how to integrate various applications, libraries, scripts, and services with Akeyless.

Akeyless Pricing

Akeyless is available for free for starter users, providing space for up to 50 static secrets. If you need to use dynamic secrets, you have to subscribe to the Team version for $49/month with a free 30-day trial. For access to more features such as keyless SSH and certificate automation, you need to upgrade to the Business package for $499/month. You can add unlimited secrets and clients with the Enterprise plan along with access to more advanced features by contacting Akeyless.

Give the range of features and the security and reliability Akeyless Vault affords, the quoted prices are certainly reasonable. You can use the free version to give the system a try or sign up for the month-long free trial under the Team and Business packages.

Verdict

Akeyless Vault is an ideal solution for a range of secrets management needs. It can scale from basic to enterprise use. The features and functions it provides easily outmatch all of the free secrets management systems and most of the enterprise solutions available. While the SaaS option is particularly notable as it does not require any installation and configuration, an on-premises solution is available for enterprise users that prefer data sovereignty. Seamless integration and various plugins make Akeyless a no-brainer choice for teams that use various platforms.

Projects to Practice Your Web Development Skills

Gaurav Belani — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 09:38:53 +0000

The best way to push yourself forward or practice the skills you have learned is to find a web development project. And the whole point of choosing a project is to pick something that challenges your current skill level.

Here are some of the essential skills that every web developer needs to possess:

HTML/CSS
JavaScript
Photoshop
WordPress
Analytical Skills
SEO
Responsive Design

In this article, let’s take a look at some of the best projects to help you practice your web development skills and build your portfolio.

1. JavaScript Login Authentication Project for Beginners

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Having JavaScript skills can help you build a website’s login authentication bar, where you enter your email/username and password to log in to the site. It is great to master this JavaScript project for beginners, as every website has a login authentication feature.

2. Build a Product Landing Page

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This project will require a solid knowledge of both HTML and CSS. You will be creating columns and aligning items within the columns; doing basic editing of images such as cropping and resizing to create perfect-sized product images for your web page.

3. JavaScript Quiz Project

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Everyone wants to quiz their brains sometimes. Whether it is a quiz determining which career path is best suited for the participants or testing the participant’s knowledge on a current topic, quizzes are both fun and useful.

For instance, you can create that asks 4 multiple-choice questions. While working on this project, you will learn plenty about data management and creating a scoring system in programming.

4. Work On a Technical Documentation Page

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This project will demand some knowledge of HTML CSS and bootstrap or JavaScript.

In this type of page, when you click on a topic on the left, it loads that content on the right.

5. Build a Survey Form

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If you are skilled in HTML/html5, you can build a survey form. Forms are great for collecting data online. This Project will mainly test your skills on all

kinds of inputs apart from your knowledge of forms and structuring your webpage.

6. Build a Tribute Page

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You can write a tribute to someone you admire and publish as a web page. In this project, you will be working with adding images, links, lists, and paragraphs.

You will have to possess knowledge of HTML to create a tribute page. You can apply your CSS skills to make the project look more aesthetically appealing.

7. Build a To-Do List using JavaScript

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JavaScript is especially useful for interactive coding lists that allow users to add, remove, and group items. It is something you can’t do using only HTML and CSS. Go on and build a To-Do list with the skills with the JavaScript skills you
possess.

8. Build a Google.com Page

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Try replicating a Google.com page with icons, Google’s logo, a text box, and two buttons and see whether you can make the perfect clone.

Note that in this project, you are making a lookalike google.com and not a page that function like google.com. For this, you will have to be skilled in both HTML and CSS.

9. Build an SEO-Friendly Web

Apart from possessing the skills to build a professional, brand-centric website design, it’s critical to make sure the site design you build is SEO-friendly.

Many website owners invest in SEO experts to improve a website’s visibility and rank in search engines like Google and Yahoo. You can take up one of the projects.

In this project, you will be creating user-friendly URLs, integrating responsive design so that the site can easily be viewed on a desktop or mobile device, and integrating the brand’s social media presence into the page.

10. Put Your Own Twist to an Icon Set

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While ubiquitous and easy to overlook, icon sets are a backbone of web design. Having the ability to design them will be a great addition to your portfolio. It can define your aesthetic and help people remember you and your work when examining portfolios.

11. Create Sliding JavaScript Drawers

The JavaScript github project (Pushbar.js) is a JavaScript plugin with which you can add “sliding drawer” menus. These are menus you can pull onscreen from the top, bottom, and/or left and right of an app to their website or app. You can have a look at the code and try to come up with something similar.

12. Build a JavaScript Drawing

Take inspiration from JavaScript project like Narayana’s Infinite Rainbow on CodePen and consider drawing something similar. You can use JavaScript as a drawing tool, bringing HTML and CSS elements to life on a web browser screen.

The skill to make static pages look more appealing with graphical elements is a crucial part of web development. Learn how to make the most out of JavaScript’s drawing capabilities.

13. Google.com Search Result Page

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Try creating a page with the format of a Google search result. The page should show at least 10 search results on average and have the navigation to the next pages at the bottom. The functionality should not necessarily be a concern in the beginning.

14. Create a Personal Portfolio Webpage

You will be using your HTML and CSS skills, and you will also need to know how to crop and resize images. Consider using free, open sources like Gimp if you don’t have any other option. It is available on Windows and Linux.
Winding-Up:

After learning everything you need to learn about your tech skills, it can still be tough to think of project ideas.

The projects mentioned above can help you practice your different web development skills while pushing you forward and assisting you in building portfolios. The more you practice, the better your skills will become. So work on as many projects as it takes to master your skills.

Also, remember to pick a project that challenges your skill. It will help you learn more and acquire new skills, ultimately widening your career scope.

Furthermore, if you build additional skills, including data science, machine learning, IoT, etc., you can work on even more advanced web projects. So, hone your technical skills and take on as many web projects as you want!

Will Uber's Ludwig Actually Help Anybody Use Deep Learning Without Code?

Gaurav Belani — Thu, 16 May 2019 14:53:20 +0000

Can you really hail a cab on a busy New York street just by opening an app on your phone?

Can you really create and launch an e-commerce store with Shopify and get selling in a day?

Can you really develop a beautiful and responsive CMS based site using WebFlow?

The answer to all those questions is a resounding yes, and that is also our answer to ‘Will Uber Ludwig actually help anyone use deep learning without code?' of course it will. It has been designed to do that, and now that it has been made open source, more and more support is only going to flow in, helping build a large community.

So let's take a step back and talk about the basics here.

What is Uber Ludwig?

Ludwig is a toolbox built on top of TensorFlow that allows anyone to train and test deep learning models without the need to write any code. It provides a data type based approach to develop a predictive deep learning model suitable for a wide range of applications. In essence, it will allow non-experts to develop and integrate deep learning models in their website or app to get the full benefit of a deep learning system that will help them accelerate their business or improve their lives. These non-experts, and even experts for that matter, can leverage this powerful new technology to dramatically reduce time spent training and testing deep learning models and instead “Focus on developing deep learning architectures rather than data wrangling” to quote the Uber researchers from their blog post

How Does It Do This?

Deep learning was supposed to be tough, and only the forte of skilled math-heads, right? Well, yes. Until a few years ago, you needed a PhD to even understand what algorithms, encoders and machine learning meant. But the way internet has exploded has made technology a truly democratic entity. Today, with platforms like Ludwig, anyone can learn to leverage deep learning to solve business problems and accelerate growth.

Whether you want to do a sentiment analysis of the comments, build an automatic image caption generator, or even build an intuitive chatbot that uses Natural Language Processing to provide extremely human-like responses to random customer queries, Ludwig's got your back. Uber researchers claim that the extremely simplified configuration of Ludwig can cut down the time spend training deep learning models.

All you need to do is upload a CSV dataset containing all the data from any of the online tools you use, along with a model definition YAML configuration file that specifies a list of inputs and outputs. Just specify the columns in your CSV that are inputs to your model and the ones that are outputs, tell Ludwig your target variables and that's it. Ludwig will automatically create a deep learning model for you and train it to predict your outcomes.

Ludwig performs a random split of the data, creates tests and validation sets, preprocesses data, builds encoders for all the different inputs, builds the combiner and then decoders for the output targets. Using these, it trains the model until the desired accuracy is achieved.

Ludwig uses specially created encoders that map the raw data to the tensors, combines it and then uses decoders to map tensors to the raw data. You can choose to get more specific with how you use Ludwig, by specifying which encoder and decoder to use for certain particular features in the dataset. You can even set the architectural and training parameters for each encoder and decoder.

Non-experts can simply upload datasets and let the ‘black box' do its thing while the more technical ones can choose to set each parameter individually to attain as much personalized configuration as they like. This flexibility is one of Ludwig's core offerings. It also offers a programmatic API allowing users to use a simple Python API to load an existing model and train it to extract predictions on new datasets.

Currently, they have encoders for a number of data types like binary, numerical, sequence and more. In the future though, they intend to extend encoders support for data types such as Transformer, ELMo and BERT for text as well as DenseNet and FractalNet for images. Ludwig offers a number of visualization options to then watch the model pull out insights from the data.

Will Ludwig's no-code AI really take over developer's jobs?

Even those who are well versed in coding, AI and machine learning cannot resist the temptation to cut out the repetitive and mundane work and use a code-free platform instead. Such platforms foster creativity and help build a community of makers. So with platforms like Ludwig, the developers aren't going to be put out of their jobs.

Instead, they will get a chance to work on developing more creative solutions to real world problems instead of writing reams of verbose code. Open source communities like Ludwig depend on contributors to grow and flourish. Suffice to say that developers worth their salt aren't going to be replaced by code-free anytime soon. It will however, allow anyone to develop and train a deep learning model of course.

Images Source: https://uber.github.io/ludwig/examples/