Many big IT companies such as Amazon (Web Services), Google (Cloud Platform), Microsoft (Azure) and IBM (Developer Cloud) have started providing Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) in the last few years. These programs are intended to reduce the entrance costs of using Artificial Intelligence to other companies.

So, what is AIaaS?

Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) helps businesses to leverage AI for different use cases while simultaneously reducing risk and expense. This can involve a sampling of several public cloud platforms to test various algorithms in machine learning. The applicability of AIaaS reaches through all sectors and as the features associated with each service provider are different, users can choose from a number of choices, including enterprises.

In this article, we will look at some of the advantages that businesses can gain by using AIaaS.

Why leverage AIaaS for the business solution?

Cost and Time Effective

One of the major advantages associated with AIaaS is the reduced expense and time taken to implement the solution. It saves businesses from setting up their own applications by having a ready infrastructure and pretrained algorithms. While earlier business solutions had to create their own application, now all that businesses need to do in this case is to call a service provider.

AIaaS is based on existing cloud framework by training the machine learning models and then deploying them for inference to VMs and containers. Service providers use the existing infrastructure that would otherwise have built on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) without building custom machine learning models. That is another significant benefit as it decreases financial risk and increases strategic versatility.

Usability

With AWS, Microsoft and Google leading the market, businesses are now competing with each other to build tools for data scientists and developers in an effort to be more than just service providers. Adding to this is the move to open-source their platforms such as TensorFlow, Caffe and AutoML enabling developers to create a custom AI model.

Transparency

With lower costs, there’s a lot of transparency within AIaaS: pay for what you’re using. Even though machine learning takes a lot of power to hewn it’s working, you may only need the power in a short period of time – you don’t have to run AI non-stop.

Scalability

AIaaS lets you begin with smaller projects to learn if this is the best match for those projects. You can customize your service and scale up or down as project demands change, as you gain expertise with your own data.

Types of AIaaS

Bots and digital assistance

This will include, for example, chat bots that use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that learn from human speech and mimic the patterns of language while providing responses. It frees customer service staff and lets them concentrate on more complicated activities. These are the forms of AIaaS most commonly used currently.

Cognitive computing APIs

Short for application programming interface, APIs are a means for developers to add a new feature or service without writing the code from scratch to the application they are building up. Popular API solutions include NLP, speech and computer vision, translation, knowledge mapping, search, and detection of emotions.

Machine learning frameworks 

These are methods that developers can use to build their own model, that learns from current organization data over time. Machine learning is often linked with big data but can also have other uses – and these frameworks offer a way to build in machine learning activities without the big data environment being needed.

Fully-managed machine learning services 

If machine learning frameworks are the first step towards machine learning, this alternative is a way to incorporate templates, pre-built models, and drag-and-drop tools to create a more customized machine learning system for developers.

AIaaS Vendors

The four major AIaaS providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, are quite well-known. Each vendor provides different types of bots, APIs, and machine learning frameworks, as well as full-managed machine learning options for all but IBM.

Many well-known technology firms, including Oracle, BMC and SalesForce, are starting to enter the competition.

There are numerous start-ups already working on different parts of AIaaS. This is the case in all industries; purchasing the smaller companies is not unusual for the bigger corporations to add the developed services to their portfolios.

The Position for AIaaS

AIaaS models will be vital for the implementation of AI. AIaaS greatly enhances business processes by providing analytical behaviors that are persistently learned and perfected by a machine. Knowledge obtained from specially-built algorithms allows organizations operate in ever more effective ways based on real-time, highly granular insights.

AIaaS is how the promise of AI can be understood, and how businesses will be changed for the better. Everything that once was a distant dream has come to life. It’s high time to embrace it.

This year has been very exciting year for cloud computing and it is only going to get bigger in the years ahead. It’s quite clear why businesses are preferring cloud computing; they are easier, affordable and it is easy to use cloud services of third-party rather than maintaining your own data centers on your own premises.

Due to the shift in cloud computing, businesses, irrespective of the size, have been allowed to access scalable resources, lower their IT costs, and cut down the on-site load of their IT infrastructure.

No matter what size, your business is the looming threat of hackers to steal information. So, in a situation like this, businesses should act responsibly and ought to be prepared when it comes to securing their data from hackers.

It is indeed possible to keep your data secured on a cloud, but there is no doubt that cyber-threats are evolving and cloud severs are their key target.

Here are a few tips on how you can safeguard your cloud security from cyber-attack!

Identify the risks first

The first and most important thing to do to prevent your business from a cyber-attack is by carefully scrutinizing the internal and external vulnerabilities your business encounters when it comes to hackers. What you need to do is prohibiting the way from where you think a hacker can gain entry into your system and that can be done by identifying your weaknesses. The most apt way to do it is to be informed about the several cyber fraud schemes and threats, such as malware, system hacking, phishing and various others that a business faces. Once you know your own vulnerabilities, you can handle them in the following ways.

Data Encryption

To date, encryption is the best way to protect the confidentiality and privacy of your data. Keep in mind that hackers are always looking for standard company-held information, whether they are bank-routing digits or employee social security numbers. So, remember to take measures to get this information encrypted. You can guard your information by switching to full-disk encryption tools which come by default with most of the operating systems. It should not take more than a minute to switch encryption of these devices on and all files on your drive will be encrypted without slowing down.

Moreover, end-to-end encryption ensures the best level of protection for secretive information and documents. As a result of end-to-end encryption, encryption is carried out on the client side so that files are encrypted before they leave your device and continue to be encrypted till they reach the supposed recipient.

Stronger Passwords and Authentication

This is the most common warning you must have heard a hundred times. But people give it a deaf ear and create easy-to-remember passwords, which is why their accounts get hacked. The most familiar source of cyber-attack is password prediction, yet it is the most preventable one. The tip is to think strategically when you create them. Moreover, keep changing the password often. Never try to reuse an old password or use the same password for various accounts. Do not keep any password in the cloud, or text file. Furthermore, complement your password with two-factor authentication requirement for accessing sensitive company information services.

Prefer Private Clouds

It would be extremely foolish to save a little amount of money and go for an inexpensive cloud. The reduced cost public clouds might look tempting, but they are frequently riddled with security threats and vulnerabilities. Although private clouds are expensive, they have minimal entry points and more stringent safety measures in place. Moreover, these private clouds are in a fairly good position to monitor your account while allowing them to preemptively deflect attacks and minimize their impact.

Protect Data Transfer Channels

The transference of data back and forth to the cloud travels through the internet which is where your data becomes the most vulnerable. Note that data must be encrypted in the cloud environment at all stages of transfer and storage.
So, be sure about the channels you pick for data transfer and make sure the data is encrypted before it is sent out anywhere. Protecting data transfer channels is a convenient way to prevent any sophisticated cyber-attacks which most of the people usually overlook.

Recognize Your Software Interfaces

ERP software applications are accessed through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) on the cloud. Any cloud developers should assure that the clients access the application through secure APIs which requires restricting the range of IP addresses or giving access only through corporate networks or VPNs. However, it is quite difficult to implement.

So, just to be sure yourself, perform the evaluation of the existing API to examine if there are any vulnerabilities. Analyze ways to boost it or you can simply switch to an API which is more secure.

Bottom Line

With cloud technology, where there are conveniences, there are certain types of risks as well.
By understanding and implementing these necessary steps, one can smartly safeguard one’s cloud security, and cyber-threats can be easily thwarted. If the cloud technology is dealt rightly, it can be the most cost-effective and securest place.

Companies of all sizes endorse virtualization as a means of cutting IT expenses, improving security and increasing operational efficiency. Even while people are already informed of the benefits, when it comes to the various types of virtualization, others are still in the dark.

While virtualization has its origins since the early 1960s, it gained enormous popularity between 2003-2010. It contributes to the evolution of the latest technologies trend, such as the cloud computing  data centers. Moreover, virtualization technology has been responsible to a certain extent for planting the seeds for cloud technology.

Here are some prominent benefits of virtualization:

• Flexible and efficient resource allocation.

• Pay per IT infrastructure use on demand.

• Improve development productivity.

• Reduce IT infrastructure costs.

• Allow multiple operating system processes.

• Fast scalability and remote access.

• Disaster recovery management

Now, we’ll show you some of the most popular types of virtualization and how they can be a game-changer for your business.

Application virtualization

This is a process where applications such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets are virtualized and delivered from a server to the end user’s device. So instead of logging into their workplace computers, users will be able to access the application directly from their device, provided there is an Internet connection. This is especially popular with businesses that need on-the-go use of their applications.

A remote application must run on a server, and some type of remote display protocol is used by the client to connect back to the client machine. Knowing that a vast number of system administrators and users have remote running experience, setting up remote displays for applications can be reasonably straightforward.

You may run one copy of the application on the server with a streaming application, and then have access to other client desktops, and run the streaming application locally. The update process becomes simpler while streaming the application, as you only set up another streaming application with the latest edition and have the end users refer to the application’s new version.

Server Virtualization

Virtualization of the server allows multiple virtual machines to function on one physical server. The virtual servers share the physical server resources, which contributes to optimal utilization of the resources of the physical servers. The resources the virtual machines share are CPU, storage, memory, and networking. All these tools are made available to the virtual machines via the physical hypervisor server.

The hypervisor is the physical box operating system and software. The virtual machine runs on the same box, independent of other virtual machines. Virtual machines can have differing modes of operation and are separated from one another.

The server virtualization is a means to combine applications that used to operate on separate physical servers, and now functions on the same physical server defined by virtual machines with the hypervisor software.

Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization helps the operating environment of the users to be stored centrally in the data center on a server. It allows the user to access their desktop directly from different machines from any location. Those who use specific operating systems apart from Windows Server require a virtual desktop. Key benefits of desktop virtualization are device mobility, functionality, updates and patches and simple software installation management.

Storage Virtualization

The process of grouping physical storage using software to represent what appears to be a single storage unit in a virtual environment is Storage Virtualization. Variables can be generated between storage virtualization and standard virtual machines, as both take and abstract access to physical hardware and resources.

A traditional virtual machine and a virtual storage are different from each other. The virtual machine is a series of files, while on the storage controller, which is created using software, virtual storage usually runs in memory.

For several years, a form of virtualization of storage has been implemented into the storage features. Features including Snapshots and RAID take and display physical disks in a virtual format. Such features may include a format to help with the performance or add resilience to the storage that is provided as a volume to the host.

Vendors of the storage array also implemented storage virtualization of their respective arrays within the operating system. This kind of virtualization of storage is called virtualization of the internal storage. Additionally, Veritas and several other storage vendors implement the external storage virtualization.

Hardware Virtualization

It is probably the most common type of virtualization nowadays; a virtual machine manager (VM) called the “hypervisor” makes hardware virtualization viable. The hypervisor produces virtual versions of computers and operating systems and consolidates them into one massive physical server, allowing for more efficient utilization of all hardware resources. Also, it helps users to run multiple operating systems concurrently on the same machine.

What Is Xamarin?

Xamarin is a development platform that lets you write cross-platform, but native, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps in C #and.NET.

Xamarin includes the Native Android and iOS APIs with C #bindings. This provides you the ability to use any of the native user interface, notifications, images, animations, and other features of the Android and iOS phone— everything using C#.

Each new release of Android and iOS can be paired with Xamarin, with a new release that includes bindings for their new APIs.

Xamarin’s.NET port provides functionality such as data types, generics, delegates, language-integrated query (LINQ), sequential programming patterns, garbage collection with a subset of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Libraries are operated with a linger to have only those components that are referenced.

Pros of Xamarin

To understand what makes Xamarin so prominent, and why a business should opt for it rather than separately developing native mobile applications, let’s take a closer look at the notable features and key business benefits of Xamarin.

Compatible Code

Xamarin is a development platform that helps you create 60-95% of reusable code. That is why it is often referred to as “write once, use everywhere”. A single codebase can run on a number of native performance platforms, which may require minimal changes only.

Comes without limits

One of Xamarin’s smartest features is that it isn’t attempting to impose commonality where there’s none. Android and iOS each have UI and SDK features that are distinct from the look and feel of each platform. Such features are central to iOS apps that feel like iOS and Android apps feeling like Android.

Some cross-platform application development tools attempt to conceal the uniqueness of the platform which results in apps feeling unfamiliar to the platform they are running on. Xamarin is doing exactly the same. Xamarin focuses on the unique features of each platform.

Besides the standard.NET classes, Xamarin offersiOS-specific.NET classes and Android-specific.NET classes, each of which exposes their respective platform’s specific functionality. Incorporating the core. .NET classes with the platform-specific classes allows applications to share core logic in both iOS and Android, thus taking advantage of the unique features of each platform.

Native Look-and-Feel

When developing a cross-platform solution, you don’t have to compromise user experience, since Xamarin offers the look-and-feel equivalent to native applications.

The use of platform-specific elements and technologies accessible in C #and Visual Studio makes the nativity possible:

• Android and Xamarin.iOS have the full access to Android and iOS SDKs for.NET developers
• Essentials library gives access to central overlapping native APIs
• Forms presents a user interface (UI) toolkit for all mobile platforms, allowing you to reap the benefits of all the unique components in one place and create a single platform-specific interface solution.

Saves Time and Expenses

Because everything is written in C# and within the.NET framework, different teams are not required for working on the app. Development expenses and maintenance costs are minimized with a single team. It is especially useful for companies with limited human and hardware resources.

In addition, the development, testing and deployment processes are substantially simplified when performed by a single team and using a single technological stack which also provides minimal market time.

Microsoft’s Technical Support

Xamarin assures reliability, continuous technological assistance and fast problem solving as it is supported by Microsoft— one of the leading global tech software companies.

Moreover, on the official Microsoft Learn platform, Microsoft offers access to robust educational opportunities, including self-paced Xamarin courses and extensive tech documents. Developers are therefore not working in a vacuum and can get support while developing their skills.

Fewer Bugs

The primary reason Xamarin tends to cause fewer bugs is the same reason that it offers quicker time-to-market: less code is written. The less code we write, the fewer bugs are expected.

Xamarin also eliminates errors by giving the possibility of wider test coverage. Any provided project has a finite amount of test time. We will write a single, more detailed series of tests that verify the code on all systems rather than wasting more time writing two sets of essentially redundant tests.

It also has the capability to minimize bugs by providing the opportunity for greater test coverage. Any given project has a defined or limited amount of time given for testing. Instead of spending that time writing two sets of largely duplicated tests, we can write a single, more detailed set of tests validating the code on both platforms.

With Xamarin the whole team will focus solely on working with. NET / C#. This enables the skills of each team member to develop more thoroughly and allows the team as a whole to properly support and inspect one another.

Future Readiness

By using Xamarin to build our iOS / Android applications, we’re able to get our apps ready to support Windows Phone without spending a single second in Windows Phone development. All the shared logic that we create for our iOS / Android app will be completely embraced by Windows Phone as long as we show that we want that to be the case when we first create the project.

It allows us to build our app without pouring any effort into Windows Phone development. Nevertheless, should a Windows Phone opportunity arise, all we have to do is build the Windows Phone UI, and instead of just two, our app now supports three smartphone platforms.